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Date: 2002-08-10 08:37:59
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National Journal's package on progress in homeland security since 9/11 is
out today - full text below.


NATIONAL SECURITY
Are We Safer?

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. and Siobhan Gorman, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Aug. 9, 2002


On the morning of September 11, 2001, America's sense of security collapsed
along with the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The eruption of dust
that blinded Manhattan on that day has long since settled. But the frenzy of
our response to terror has never really died down. There is so much
activity, in so many organizations, in so many places, that it can be
difficult to determine whether we are accomplishing anything. Today, nearly
a year after 9/11, we are fighting through another cloud of dust -- this one
kicked up by our own frantic efforts -- as we try to find a path to safety.
But are we getting there? Are we safer today than we were at 8:45 a.m. on
September 11?

  In examining 69 specific areas of homeland security, National Journal finds
that the answer is a qualified yes. But not all the progress originates in
Washington.

Based on research by 15 National Journal staffers into fields from
firefighting to medicine to nuclear power, the answer is actually a yes. But
it is a qualified yes. The accumulation of anecdotes and fragmentary
statistics clearly points to real progress. But it is impossible to quantify
that progress in the absence of a comprehensive, coherent, and nationwide
assessment of the threats, our vulnerabilities, and how the two match up.
What the scores of experts and officials interviewed for these stories agree
on, however, is that as far as we have come, we have much further to go. The
baseline of homeland security as of September 11, 2001, was so low -- as
3,000 people would tell you, if they were only here to testify -- that being
significantly safer still does not make us safe enough.

That is the first sobering truth. There is a second truth, one especially
chastening for the nation's political and policy elite. Since 9/11,
Washington has spent tremendous energy on securing the homeland. But
activity does not always equal achievement, reforms voted for are not
reforms implemented, and dollars appropriated here are not dollars spent in
the field, let alone spent usefully. After launching a successful offensive
against Al Qaeda's bases in Afghanistan, the administration, along with
Congress, has focused its efforts on a federal budget that is not yet
enacted, a department that is not yet created, and a National Strategy for
Homeland Security that, in the view of many experts, sets only vague and
unconnected priorities. All of these efforts may prove essential in the long
term. But in the near term, they have had little tangible effect.

Washington's impact has largely been made overseas. "We are substantially
safer, but not because of anything that was done in this country," said
James Woolsey, former CIA director. "We're safer because we went to war in
Afghanistan and captured and killed a large number of Al Qaeda, and
disrupted their worldwide operations. In this country, basically, we have
not yet begun to fight."

But while the generals in Washington debate strategy, the foot soldiers
beyond the Beltway have begun to move out on their own. Be they federal
field agents, Customs inspectors, local firefighters, beat cops, bankers,
airline pilots, chemical plant employees, or just concerned citizens,
countless thousands of individuals have stepped forward to try to fix
whatever vulnerability was right in front of them. These efforts are
spontaneous, uncoordinated, and piecemeal, but they add up. They are no
substitute for a comprehensive national plan, which will, it is hoped,
emerge from the current debate in Washington. But as of today, to the extent
we are safer at home than we were on September 11, it is not because of what
the elites have talked about inside the Beltway, but because of what
ordinary Americans have done outside it.

Progress Beyond The Beltway
No image of 9/11 is seared as deeply into the American mind as the video of
a commercial airliner slicing into the south tower of the World Trade Center
and emerging on the other side as a ball of flame. No wonder, then, that out
of all our many vulnerabilities, the federal government has focused its most
urgent and intense attention on air safety: undercover air marshals, federal
baggage screeners, $6.25 billion in emergency appropriations, and the
creation of an all-new federal agency, the Transportation Security
Administration. Some of these measures are already in effect; just ask air
passenger Raho Ortiz, who in November forgot the new rule to stay seated for
the 30 minutes before landing at Reagan National Airport, stood up to use
the restroom, and got an air marshal's pistol in his face. But experts
estimate that such undercover agents are on fewer than 5 percent of flights,
and most of the federal baggage screeners are not yet hired. So even in air
safety -- the focus of the federal effort -- most of what Washington has
ordered has still to take effect. Yet experts agree that another 9/11-style
hijacking is all but impossible, thanks not to the government, but to the
airlines, the aircrews, and the passengers themselves.

"We are fighting the last war, and we are doing it in a stupid, stupid way,"
said James K. Coyne, a former House member and current president of the
National Air Transportation Association, in disparaging the proposed army of
baggage screeners. Pointing to the airlines' moves to reinforce cockpit
doors and install surveillance cameras, steps that predated any federal
mandates to do so, Coyne argued, "The security improvements that have taken
place have been done independent of government action."

In fact, the most important changes in aviation security do not even result
from corporate policy -- much less from federal edicts -- but from a new
awareness among passengers and crew members. In the early hours of September
11, their reaction was to submit, which was standard procedure for a
hijacking: Keep your head down and the terrorists happy, and they probably
won't kill you. But within one hour and 17 minutes, the passengers and
surviving crew of United Airlines Flight 93 realized that that logic had
been reversed. They died fighting, quite possibly saving the Capitol or the
White House from destruction. Less than four months later, in one of the
more darkly comic episodes of the terror war, would-be suicide bomber
Richard Reid got pummeled, doused with water, and yanked by the hair, by
flight attendants and passengers who saw him trying to light a fuse in his
shoe. Bombs in checked baggage are still a real threat, but a successful
hijacking is almost unimaginable, even if the terrorists had guns -- not
because clever feds would stop them, but because desperate passengers would
mob them.

"We are certainly not as safe as we could be," said Ivo Daalder of the
Brookings Institution, who is deeply skeptical of the administration's
efforts to date. But Daalder believes that heightened public awareness has
made a major contribution. "The reason to believe we're better than we were
on September 10," he said, "is that we have 280 million first responders."
We, the people of the United States, provide for the common defense, one
person at a time.

By definition, no one plans such a bottom-up, decentralized approach. It
simply happens. In this case, it had to happen, because most of what the
federal government can do simply takes too long to put in place. Budget
increases for federal agencies are just now beginning to trickle down to the
front lines, and grants to state and local governments are even further
behind.

Even where federal officials could simply order safety improvements, private
industry has sometimes beat them to it. Nuclear power plants went on high
alert on September 11 and they have since stepped up security even more,
largely on their own initiative. Banks have begun insisting that
subcontractors for energy and telecommunications have secure, redundant
backup systems.

Even in the federal agencies themselves, much progress comes from the rank
and file. Worldwide, the State Department's consular affairs officials are
taking extra care with routine visa applications, painfully aware that all
19 of the known 9/11 hijackers entered the country legally. At one major
U.S.-Canadian border crossing, trucks backed up waiting for a Customs
inspection were diverted to a parking lot where they were supposed to wait
their turn. But many simply drove on because there was no guard on the
parking lot's back gate. It was ordinary inspectors, through their union,
who badgered managers, lobbied visiting senators, and finally got a guard
posted at the exit from the parking lot. "We implemented that two weeks ago,
and we found 50 trucks that attempted to leave without permission," said one
Customs employee. "That's been open for 10 years."

Today, trucks cannot slip out of the Customs parking lot. But the parking
lot is not actually at the border. Trucks entering the country still get to
the inspection site by driving, unmonitored, across a densely populated U.S.
city. Customs agents at the border just tell each driver where to go and
trust he does not drop off anything illegal or lethal on the way, said the
Customs employee: "What we do is keep his paperwork to make sure he gets
here. What a crock!"

All the bottom-up initiative in the world cannot replace clear direction
from the top. The efforts of field agents, local governments, and private
companies are by definition spontaneous and uncoordinated -- and they leave
gaps. It is great to let a hundred flowers bloom, but a gardener needs to be
tending them. Washington now has a proposal for a new central organization,
the Department of Homeland Security, and a national strategy for the
department to implement. But is this vision enough?

Adhocracy In The Capital
If the capture of shoe-bomber Richard Reid is an example of grassroots
self-defense at its most effective, the federal Transportation Security
Administration is an example of top-down reform at its most confused. Unlike
the proposed Department of Homeland Security, the TSA actually exists. But
its air marshal recruitment program is sucking veteran law enforcers out of
other hard-pressed agencies; its 8,000 baggage screeners hired to date are
just a quarter of the projected requirement; and its first chief, John
Magaw, recently was forced out under a cloud. Even the TSA's jurisdiction is
unclear: security for the entire airport, or just past the security
checkpoint? "The government has no idea what it's doing right now," said
Mark Anderson, senior director for government relations at United Airlines.

"Adhocracy" has dominated Washington's approach to homeland security since
September 11. The scramble is understandable. But it has allowed a lot of
money to be spent on a series of scattered initiatives -- from airports to
borders to cyber-space -- with little overarching logic to fit the pieces
together. The solution was supposed to be the "National Strategy for
Homeland Security," issued in July. But its 88 handsomely presented pages
left many experts unimpressed.

"It's a laundry list with no strategic direction," said Brookings's Daalder.
It "could have been done overnight. If a hundred people in the Office of
Homeland Security need 10 months to come up with this drivel, I don't feel
terribly more secure."

Even less-savage critics fear that the new Fortress America is being built
on a weak intellectual foundation. "I don't think you can do anything
effectively without a starting point," said Phil Anderson of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies. "That starting point is the threat."
And even fans of the national strategy admit that it is not based on a
systematic analysis of the danger: "The strategy is concerned with
vulnerabilities, not threats," acknowledged Dave McIntyre of the ANSER
Institute for Homeland Security in Arlington, Va.

But the government's examination of vulnerabilities has not been that
systematic, either, argued John Cohen, a former police detective in Southern
California and a one-time House Judiciary staffer who now consults with
local governments. The national strategy, Cohen said, repeatedly raises
life-and-death issues only to say, "The department will work to determine
this."

Those threat and vulnerability assessments will come, said Sally Canfield,
deputy director of policy at the White House's Office of Homeland Security.
The administration should complete a "critical infrastructure" study, for
example, by early October.

Doing such assessments right, however, will require inventing a whole new
approach. Government is good at quantifying what it has spent, not the
results it has achieved. And the national strategy itself emphasizes that
national resources are limited, that potential threats are not -- and that
applying some kind of cost-effectiveness test is crucial. The
administration, which is full of former business executives, might do well
to borrow private-sector techniques. "They need to have a coherent
assessment of risk versus security-value added," said Lynda Taskett of
Deloitte Consulting. Tests by teams of people trying to think like
terrorists -- so-called Red Teams -- and statistics such as apprehensions
per week per agency, could help the government judge how easy it is for a
terrorist to get a visa, how easy to enter the country, or how easy to avoid
law enforcement once in the United States. Then government could estimate
where in the process we can throw the most-effective obstacles in a
terrorist's path at the least cost in money, inconvenience, and civil
liberties to ourselves.

Conducting such analysis is a daunting task, one the administration
acknowledges has only just begun. The proposals to date are only down
payments on long-term reform. The purpose of the national strategy, in
particular, said the White House's Canfield, is not to answer every question
but to provide "a framework for us to move forward" and to focus national
attention on the proposed new department. "There's obviously more to come."

In the meantime, however, what Washington has got is a partisan wrangle over
whether employees in the proposed department can join unions. "It shows how
frustrated both parties must be," said Paul Light, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution. "If they can't reach a conclusion about what to do
about this impasse, they're just looking for a fight. I don't think they
have figured out what the policy is."

Indeed, some commentators fear the debate over the proposed department is so
distracting that it is making America less safe. Homeland Security Director
Tom Ridge "has been spending all his time trying to convince Congress why we
need this department, and he has spent none of his time on his day job,"
Daalder said. And once the department has been created, Daalder added,
employees will spend the next two to three years focused on the
organizational chart and job security, not on homeland security.

Cohen, a veteran counternarcotics investigator, agreed: "Just because you
move all of these agencies and functions into one department doesn't
necessarily mean they're going to be any more effective.... Look at the
Justice Department and the lack of coordination between the DEA, the FBI,
and the U.S. Marshals Service in anti-drug efforts."

Indeed, the emerging consensus is that just such bureaucratic frictions
helped bring us to 9/11, by letting crucial clues fall between the stools of
different intelligence agencies. The administration's national strategy
highlights the importance of new procedures and technologies to share
information among agencies. Yet the $37.7 billion in homeland security
spending the administration proposed for 2003 allocates only $722 million
for this top priority. And Congress has essentially set aside plans to
reform intelligence in order to concentrate on the proposed department.

Obviously, there are too many important things to tackle all at once, and
the perfect can be the enemy of the good. But the mediocre can be the enemy
of the good, as well. So can the politically expedient. Measures that are
easily summed up in a soundbite -- the creation of entire new agencies, for
example -- can divert attention from less-obvious but more-essential
reforms, such as systematic assessment of threats and vulnerabilities, or a
streamlined, Information Age system for interagency information-sharing. And
even after a world-shattering event like 9/11, the momentum for change
eventually runs out.

When senators and senior administration officials visited a major
U.S.-Canadian border crossing, they were kept a safe distance from any
details that might make local administrators look bad, said the Customs
employee. "They dog-and-pony them and show them how we're taking care of
drugs and terrorism," the employee said. But management's message to
employees is, "Traffic's got to move. The threat's gone." In some respects,
he said, "It's right back to September 10."

Miles To Go
How much progress has the United States really made toward safety? The
related stories offer detailed assessments of 69 key areas. Overall, if the
country were a college student taking a course in homeland security, it
would definitely be a sophomore -- wise enough to understand the question,
foolish enough to fumble much of the answer. America's report card would
probably average out to a gentleman's C: C+ for the valiant if scattered
progress made beyond the Beltway, C- for the efforts within it. Fortunately,
this is only the midterm grade. But the final exam could be a killer.

Once Washington has thrashed out the size, shape, and civil-service rules of
the proposed Homeland Security Department, the next agenda item will be the
administration's nascent effort to assess terrorist threats, American
vulnerabilities, and our progress toward reducing both. Even trying to make
such a comprehensive assessment will highlight the problems the government
still has in sharing information among bureaucracies -- arguably the
greatest single weakness exposed by 9/11. The assessment will require
something else government is bad at: measuring not just spending, but also
results. It is a question of probabilities, not certainties; of being
relatively safer, not absolutely safe. Everyone acknowledges the road ahead
is long, uncertain, and dangerous.

"There are two tracks here," said the White House's Canfield. "There are
tangible things we've done since 9/11, but there are also institutional and
systemic changes we're making. It's very difficult to try to say whether
we're safer" now, she said. "Reorganization of the government doesn't happen
overnight."

Sixty years ago, the United States stood at the turning point of another
global war. By dawn on June 7, 1942 -- precisely seven months after the
attack on Pearl Harbor -- the U.S. Navy had turned the tables on the
Japanese fleet, near a small island named Midway. Early that November, the
British broke the German Afrika Korps near El Alamein, a few weeks before
the Russians launched a crushing counterattack against Hitler at Stalingrad.
Everywhere, the Allies were making progress, the Axis retreating.

But 1942 was hardly the year of final victory. It was, instead, the year the
Free World escaped defeat. We had blunted our enemies' power to land a fatal
blow, but we were not ready to deliver one of our own. It would take years
for the United States to develop the new tactics, organize the new
institutions, and above all, mobilize the national will needed to prevail.

In November 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was asked whether
the end of the war was in sight. Churchill's answer also applies today:
"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is,
perhaps, the end of the beginning."




NATIONAL SECURITY
Preventing New Attacks
By Siobhan Gorman, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., Neil Munro, Peter H. Stone,
James Kitfield, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Aug. 9, 2002


The best way to protect the homeland is to prevent the people who want to
attack the United States from getting here. That is no small feat in a land
so open, so fond of its individual liberties, and so anchored in waves of
immigration. Ironically, America's efforts to better seal ourselves from our
enemies seem to do better the farther they are from our own shores. The war
in Afghanistan, the hunt for Al Qaeda, the securing of intelligence from
foreign governments, all can be counted as solid successes, certainly in the
A and B grades. But as we move closer to home and look at border and
immigration controls, at new laws and procedures for finding enemies within,
the record is not as good, with many C's and a few D's too. The efforts in
prevention rise well above a failing grade, but don't yet merit the dean's
list.

Border Insecurity
Experts of every stripe say that the key to border security is better
intelligence and that improving intelligence-sharing within and among
border-control and law-enforcement agencies will be a top challenge for the
new Department of Homeland Security. While new federal laws have mandated
that the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Customs Service, and
the visa-issuing State Department have access to the FBI's criminal
database, the inter-agency merging of information has been slow. In fact,
State, which has doubled the size of its "lookout" list to more than 50
million people, is the only agency reporting real progress. State has also
begun to send to the INS digital pictures of all foreigners who are issued
U.S. visas. Both Customs and the INS still have a morass of internal
databases to clean up.

Most border-security initiatives since 9/11 have focused either on doing
more of the same, such as hiring more INS and Customs agents, or on trying
to catch would-be terrorists after they're in this country -- a largely
futile enterprise, experts say. Federal agencies "cannot possibly enforce
more than 10 percent of the initiatives the attorney general seems to be
producing every few weeks," says Demetrios G. Papademetriou, co-director of
the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, based in Washington. Of the
whole border-security effort, Papademetriou offers far less than a
resounding endorsement: "Marginally, it makes us slightly more safe."

Immigration Policy: D
New immigration-related initiatives continue to be proposals in search of a
policy. "We have no policy -- coherent or otherwise," Papademetriou says.
Immediately before 9/11, the administration had begun pushing for some form
of legalization for many undocumented workers. Since 9/11, despite pressure
to tighten government control over the nation's borders, the White House has
been reluctant to address the problem of illegal immigration, for fear of
upsetting Hispanic voters.

Until the government establishes a policy to get some level of control over
illegal immigration, experts say, the nation is signaling terrorists to come
on in. Some observers argue that legalizing illegal immigrants who are
already here would boost national security; others argue for a crackdown on
illegal immigration. And tightening the rules for issuing visas is likely to
only worsen the problem of illegal immigration.

In lieu of coming to terms with illegal immigration or focusing on how to
restructure the INS, the federal government's policy is merely to beef up
personnel along the borders: The president's fiscal 2003 budget would pay
for 1,730 more INS agents and 800 more Customs agents. They would need to be
trained for about a year before becoming part of the nation's defense
system.

The security strategy for immigration should stress deterrence, says Susan
Forbes Martin, former executive director of the U.S. Commission on
Immigration Reform. "The committed terrorist who is willing to risk his
life, and everybody else's along with it, will probably find a way to
enter," she said. "What we can do is make it harder." That requires, at the
very least, enforcing the immigration laws already on the books.

Tracking Foreigners: D
Most of the INS's post-9/11 initiatives attempt to track suspected
terrorists once they're inside this country. And that is too late, experts
say.

Two "new" programs -- the entry-exit system that logs foreigners as they
come into and leave the United States, and the foreign-student-tracking
system -- were enacted by Congress in 1996. But implementation was halted
after interest groups protested. The student-tracking program, slated to
belatedly get under way by next January, will probably do little to improve
border security, Martin said. But the program will help verify whether
foreign students are enrolled in legitimate educational institutions, she
added. The most useful aspect of the entry-exit system, which makes no
attempt to track foreign visitors' behavior or whereabouts, will probably be
that it will give authorities a better idea of which countries' citizens
tend to overstay their visas, Martin said.

The Justice Department recently announced, with great fanfare, that it will
start enforcing a law that requires foreigners who are here for more than a
month to report any change of address. But INS spokesman William
Strassberger said not to expect any sort of "national roundup" of people who
fail to report in, because it would be impossible to track down all of those
foreigners. Former INS general counsel David Martin later said, "If this
system is going to be serious and meaningful, they're going to have to put
manpower into it, and go out and really look for those people." But even if
all the current tracking measures were perfectly implemented, he added,
"that's, at most, going to [produce] a very modest gain in safety."

Calling the new policies "playing catch-up," Mark Krikorian, executive
director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, said the
focus should be on making it difficult for terrorists to operate within the
United States. One way to do that would be to require proof of legal status
to get a driver's license, open a bank account, and rent or purchase
property, he said. Another way, proposed by Rep. George W. Gekas, R-Pa.,
would be to make it a crime to overstay a visa.

Canada and Mexico C+
(B+ with Canada; D+ with Mexico)
The United States has made far more progress on reaching border agreements
with Canada than with Mexico. Details of a 30-point U.S.-Canadian agreement
are being ironed out. The United States and Canada are expanding a program
called NEXUS, which allows citizens who frequently cross the border to
submit to a background check that will free them from waiting in line on
every trip. The two countries hope to enroll 100,000 NEXUS members, but it's
not clear how many of the 500 million annual U.S.-Canadian border crossings
are made by this group of frequent crossers. Canada and the United States
have also agreed to exchange customs officers in order to inspect containers
in each country's two busiest ports, and the two countries have improved
their informal information-sharing. But the most important challenges are
still ahead: sharing terrorist "watch" lists, coordinating visa and asylum
policies, and agreeing on a common biometric identifier -- such as
fingerprints or iris scans -- for travel documents.

The less ambitious, 22-point agreement with Mexico -- a plan that calls for
speeding the flow of legal traffic across the border and for U.S.-Mexican
consultation on visa policy -- has gone nowhere, say experts who are
familiar with the talks. "I'm much more confident about Canada than I am
about Mexico," Papademetriou says. Canada realizes that another terrorist
strike against the United States could have huge economic repercussions for
Canadians. But, Papademetriou says, Mexico is less fearful about the
potential effect on its economy, so it sees little reason to cooperate
unless it gets something in return -- for example, legalization of
undocumented Mexican workers in the United States.

Visas and Consular Affairs: C
The State Department's visa-issuing Office of Consular Affairs -- the first
line of defense against terrorist attacks on American soil by foreigners --
has come under fire because all of the September 11 hijackers had been able
to obtain U.S. visas. Three of the hijackers entered this country through
U.S. Visa Express, a program that granted visas through travel agents in
Saudi Arabia. After months of pressure from Congress, Visa Express was shut
down on July 20. This summer, word leaked out of State that 71 people, some
linked to the 9/11 hijackers, fraudulently obtained visas at the U.S.
Embassy in Qatar by paying $10,000 bribes. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell ousted the head of Consular Affairs, Mary Ryan.
Critics continue to question the practice of assigning the State
Department's most junior Foreign Service officers to make decisions about
who should be allowed into the United States.

Still, visa officials are now more vigilant, observers say, and State is
looking into adjusting its training program to focus it more on keeping
would-be terrorists from entering the United States legally. The department
has doubled the number of names in its database of suspected terrorists. And
in November, State instituted a 20-day waiting period for male visa
applicants between the ages of 16 and 45 who come from any of 26
predominantly Muslim countries, in order to allow time for more-thorough
background checks. In January, the department began requiring all male
applicants in that age range to fill out an additional questionnaire.
Experts deride the form, saying that no self-respecting terrorist would fill
it out truthfully.

Plus, the Transit Without Visa program, which allows foreigners without
visas to stop in a U.S. airport if they are heading to a destination abroad,
continues even though there's no system to ensure that these travelers
actually leave the United States.

In the pipeline is a plan for adding biometric identifiers -- such as
fingerprints or iris scans -- to U.S. passports and visas. State will also
require the 28 countries whose citizens now enter without a visa to add a
biometric ID to their passports if they want to remain in the Visa Waiver
Program.

State and the INS are reviewing whether to boot more countries out of the
Visa Waiver Program. So far, officials have removed only Argentina -- and
that was because its economy tanked. Italy has come under review because it
had a large number of Qaeda cells, but U.S. officials will probably let the
country stay in the program if it tightens up its passport controls. The
same goes for Belgium, whose citizens have a tendency to lose their
passports. Portugal, the most recent entrant to the waiver program, is
expected to pass scrutiny. Uruguay will likely be ousted because its
citizens rack up a lot of immigration violations. And Slovenia, in order to
remain in the program, has promised to add a biometric identifier to its
passports.

State Department diplomats have also identified countries whose lax border
controls pose the greatest potential threat to U.S. security and have been
working with them to improve their practices. For example, the United States
is helping Pakistan develop a computerized system that logs foreigners as
they come and go. "Almost all the [countries] we've worked with acknowledge
they can do better," said one State Department official. But when the United
States asked Germany to gather intelligence from its mosques, by, among
other things, mounting cameras in them, German officials refused because of
civil-liberties concerns.

Leaked State Department e-mails, in which some diplomats accused
congressional critics of McCarthyism and neo-Nazism, suggest strife within
the department over whether its response to the terrorist threat has been
adequate, said Wayne Merry, who spent 25 years in the Foreign Service. "My
sense is that the department is not so much dealing with a substantive
problem as it is dealing with a public-relations and congressional-relations
problem," he said. The responsibility for setting U.S. visa policy is likely
to eventually be transferred to the new Department of Homeland Security.

New Technologies: C-
Technology is useful only when applied well. At the borders, it's often used
too haphazardly and sporadically to significantly bolster security.
High-tech border-control equipment purchased since 9/11 has largely been the
same as the gear already in use. Customs has purchased some 40 additional
gamma-ray scanners that can detect radiation, bringing the total of such
scanners in use at America's border checkpoints and seaports to about 140.
Customs also has 4,500 more hand-held radiological scanners, which are used
to check cars at the border; that brings the total to 8,500. Still, Customs
is able to do any sort of check on less than 2 percent of the trucks and
containers pouring into the country. Experts say, however, that the agency
is getting better at targeting high-risk shipments.

Other problems remain. New radiological scanners used to check for "dirty
bombs" and other threats at seaports are sometimes set off by bananas,
because the scanners detect the fruit's potassium. At one busy land port,
Customs decided to put its gamma-ray detector in the middle of a six-lane
checkpoint instead of somewhere before approaching vehicles split into the
six lanes. So when the detector goes off, it's not clear which vehicle set
off the alarm. "Even the people who were installing it were talking about
how ridiculous it was," said one Customs employee.

The most promising technology would help Customs agents decide what not to
scan. A $28 million pilot project, Operation Safe Commerce, will test GPS
transponders that can be attached to a sealed container so it can be easily
tracked. Inside the container, sensors would detect changes in light,
pressure, temperature, or sound that might signal tampering.

Intelligence
Budgets and Staffing
After September 11 revealed glaring intelligence failures, Congress approved
an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion in new funding for America's top two
spy shops, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency,
and for the FBI, which is responsible for counterintelligence and for
stopping terrorism inside the nation's borders.

Analysts argue that these supplemental funds -- added to the combined $13
billion the three agencies had already received for this fiscal year -- were
badly needed to hire more translators, analysts, and field agents, to buy
better computer systems, to fund clandestine programs, and to improve a wide
range of operations. A House Intelligence Committee report in July
criticized all three agencies for lacking resources in such vital categories
as language specialists. The report also noted that the CIA has been hobbled
by internal guidelines -- issued in 1995 but apparently now rescinded --
that curbed the agency's hiring of operatives with "dirty" backgrounds,
people who might have been able to penetrate terrorist groups.

Post-9/11, the CIA's 2002 budget of $4 billion "has been greatly enhanced,"
said an agency official, and new money is being spent almost as quickly as
it pours in. The first supplemental appropriation of about $1 billion that
the agency reportedly received last fall was used for missions in
Afghanistan and for beefing up the agency's counter-terrorism center, which
now has twice the personnel it had on September 11. Moreover, the agency
boasts three times as many Arab speakers as it did three years ago,
according to the official. "We're not where we want to be, but we're a lot
closer," the official said.

The CIA also shared in a second supplemental appropriation of about $1.7
billion for a variety of intelligence functions in the government. The
agency is rebuilding in a number of areas that had lost about a quarter of
their personnel from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. The CIA's school
for clandestine operations, for instance, expects this year to produce its
largest class of graduates since the Vietnam War. And a new agency program
that started this year offers specialized training for analysts.

The FBI, which began the fiscal year with a budget of about $4 billion, has
received an additional $745 million since September 11 to enhance its
anti-terrorism work, now the bureau's top mission. The FBI is hiring 103 new
analysts, 30 new linguists, and 266 new field agents, a spokesman said.
Further, the agency has signed up 253 new contract linguists, with skills in
28 languages, including more than 100 who can translate Arabic. Overall, the
bureau has indicated it will hire about 900 new agents by September 2002,
including computer experts to help revamp the FBI's famously troubled
computer system.

Analysts say it is harder to measure change at the super-secret National
Security Agency, which is charged with protecting U.S. government
information and unearthing foreign secrets. Knowledgeable sources put the
NSA's budget -- which is hidden from public view -- at about $5 billion. An
NSA spokesman said that the agency has aggressively recruited language
specialists, computer scientists, engineers, and intelligence analysts. Last
year, the NSA received some 32,000 résumés and hired 600 people, he said.
This year, the agency's goal is to bring on at least 1,000 new employees.

Some veteran intelligence officers caution that even with the added funds,
all three agencies face daunting challenges. "They're throwing money at
problems that money won't entirely cure, because they're more systemic,"
observes Robert Baer, a 21-year CIA veteran of Middle East operations.
Experience, he said, is something "you can't buy with money."

Reorganization: C
How are America's intelligence agencies reorienting themselves for the war
on terror? Trying to find out is like listening to the mice inside your
wall: You can't tell exactly how many there are or where they are headed,
but there is definitely major movement going on.

The Central Intelligence Agency keeps its budget and staff strength
classified. But according to a U.S. intelligence official, the total number
of CIA analysts working on terrorism issues has quadrupled since September
11. Because recruiting, screening, and training hundreds of new spooks takes
longer than 11 months, most of this increase reflects a massive transfer of
existing personnel from lower-priority areas. Such shifts are painful and
politically tricky.

In fact, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet "tried to do this
before September 11 and failed," said Amy Zegart, a UCLA professor and an
expert on the institutional politics of intelligence. "People in other
offices balked." But the shock of the terrorist attacks broke the
bureaucratic ice, allowing a dramatic reallocation of resources.

It is not just the rank and file who have new marching orders. In May, the
CIA moved one of its top officials -- 35-year veteran Winston Wiley,
then-deputy director of intelligence -- to a newly created associate
director position devoted to fostering cooperation with other agencies on
homeland security.

At the super-secretive National Security Agency, which does electronic
eavesdropping, a major reform effort was already under way before September
11, prompted in part by a three-day collapse of NSA's computerized
processing system in January 2000.

And there are public hints of a new focus at other intelligence agencies as
well. The Pentagon's National Imagery and Mapping Agency, for example,
normally concentrates on charting potential target areas abroad. But after
9/11, NIMA gave New York City a detailed damage assessment of the World
Trade Center, including potential toxic leaks and the first estimates of the
tonnage of debris. NIMA has since put together data on U.S. railroads, dams,
sports arenas, and the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City -- mapping U.S.
vulnerabilities to help prevent attacks, by using the same techniques
developed to chart a U.S. strike on, say, Iraq.

The most-publicized reorganization is within the FBI. The nexus where
foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement meet, the agency has long
struggled through culture clashes with spy agencies and with its own
reluctance to share information.

The bureau has also had trouble sharing information internally, as when
headquarters ignored pre-9/11 warnings about Islamic extremists from its
Phoenix and Minneapolis field offices. In response, FBI Director Robert S.
Mueller III has hired more analysts and set up so-called "flying squads" at
headquarters that can travel at a moment's notice to emergency situations in
the field, thus centralizing control over the field offices.

The largest near-term shift at the bureau has been the transfer of 480
agents to counter-terrorism -- 400 of them taken from narcotics
investigations, amounting to a cut of one-third in counterdrug efforts. But
this move is only a down payment on a more fundamental FBI overhaul.

"It is an agency that needs tremendous reform," said Rep. Christopher Shays,
R-Conn., who chairs the national security panel of the House Government
Reform Committee. "The FBI is a hurting agency. We can't ignore that fact
any longer."

Information-Sharing: C-
Attitudes about information-sharing have started to change among U.S.
intelligence agencies, but there are still obstacles ahead.

"It's a new world," says Vince Cannistraro, a former head of
counter-terrorism operations at the CIA. Officials at the CIA, the FBI, and
the NSA, he said, understand "they have to cooperate at home and abroad....
It will take some time for new patterns of cooperation and collaboration to
emerge."

Before the terrorist attacks, systemic and cultural differences among the
agencies prevented the sharing of vital intelligence data. But now the CIA
is expanding its intelligence-sharing programs. For example, the number of
FBI agents assigned to the CIA's counter-terrorism center is now 14, up from
only six before September 11, according to a CIA official. In another move,
Alan Wade, the CIA's chief information officer, is helping the FBI improve
computerized links between the two agencies and within the FBI's own
networks.

The CIA is also including more government officials in its daily briefings.
Historically, the CIA has briefed the secretaries of State and Defense, but
now the agency also briefs the secretaries of Health and Human Services and
Transportation. "There are a lot of new customers receiving our
information," said the CIA official.

Moreover, there have been some strong cooperative efforts overseas; the CIA
and FBI teamed up with Pakistani intelligence in the March capture of Abu
Zubaydah, the high-level Qaeda lieutenant.

The FBI, meanwhile, has stepped up intelligence-sharing with the CIA and
with other government agencies. Now FBI Director Mueller gives the president
a daily briefing, following the long practice of the CIA director. And
Mueller has turned to the CIA for key people, such as Mark Miller, a
high-level CIA analyst who now runs the FBI's new Office of Intelligence.

The NSA, too, is focused on cooperative efforts. Since September 11, said an
NSA spokesman, the agency and its Central Security Service division, which
operates military listening posts worldwide, have had "extensive
collaboration" with other arms of the U.S. intelligence community and with
foreign allies. One example: The NSA has deployed liaisons to the military
and to other agencies engaged in the war on terrorism.

Notwithstanding these efforts, a House Intelligence Committee report in July
criticized some current anti-terrorist programs, including the FBI-CIA
interrogation of Qaeda members at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. The
report charged that the joint effort was being treated as a "low priority"
and that it was plagued with old problems, including cooperation issues.

New Technologies: C
In the Industrial Age, you could measure the power and readiness of a navy
by inspecting its battleships. In the Information Age, the littlest things
-- a daring analysis of existing data, a cleverly hidden bug in a Qaeda Web
site, a newly recruited spy, for example -- can have a huge impact. That
makes it extremely difficult to gauge improvements in the government's
intelligence-collection business, which spends several billion dollars a
year, mostly on classified spy satellites.

The intelligence agencies have displayed some new gear -- for example, the
unmanned aircraft that loiter above Afghanistan in search of Qaeda hideouts.
Companies have advertised possible new equipment, such as a tiny
robot-aircraft that would be dropped from other robot aircraft. However,
much of the new gear, including software, is classified.

Many veteran intelligence devices are also being put to new uses. For
example, Cold War satellites and Special Forces on the ground were used to
find targets for B-52 bombers as they dropped one-ton, satellite-guided
bombs on Taliban and Qaeda forces. Other assets of the intelligence
agencies, including the satellites that carry cameras, radar, and electronic
eavesdropping devices, have been redirected to find suitable wartime
targets, such as the location of hidden Qaeda bands, the electronic transfer
of terrorists' assets, or the tracking of suspicious ships.

The rub is that any spending on intelligence devices draws funds and
expertise away from other important priorities -- more analysts reading
Arabic and Asian newspapers, more medical experts traveling through Africa,
for example. Critics say these needs are still underfunded because of the
government's focus on intelligence devices.

Law
The criminal-justice system's responses to the 9/11 terrorist attacks are
among the most difficult to assess. "You really have no sense of what the
benefits are," said Robert Litt, who was a top Justice Department official
during the Clinton administration. "You don't know how many terrorist
attacks have been prevented or deterred. You don't know if any have been
prevented or deterred." The costs so far have been just as murky. Civil
libertarians have a long list of allegations of government wrongdoing, such
as trampling First Amendment rights and unlawfully denying American citizens
the right to have counsel and to be formally charged or released. Orin Kerr,
a former attorney in the Justice Department's Criminal Division, sees the
trade-off between civil liberties and the Justice Department's aggressive
fight against terrorism as "almost like a football game. The question of,
'Is it working?' is really only something you can answer when the game is
over." The problem with the war on terrorism is that no one is sure if or
when the game will ever end. In the meantime, George Washington University
constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley worries that the Bush
administration doesn't have a coherent game plan. "The administration seems
to act almost impulsively," he said. In grading the government's post-9/11
performance in the area of criminal justice, the central question is: How
well has the government balanced fighting terrorism with preserving personal
freedoms?

USA-PATRIOT Act: C+
Experts say that the USA-PATRIOT Act, signed into law on October 26, 2001,
is less sweeping than the Justice Department would have the public think and
that its potential to infringe on individual liberties is pretty small. Kerr
said the most useful aspect of the new law is likely to be its lowering of
the standards for obtaining a warrant from a secret court established by the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Now federal agents can get a warrant
to investigate a money-laundering operation suspected of being linked to
terrorism without having to prove that the case is primarily about
terrorism. The PATRIOT Act also expands wiretapping authority and permits
federal agents to secretly search homes and offices. Many of the law's
provisions expire in four years, but it may take more time than that to know
whether these expanded powers are making a real difference in the war on
terrorism. In a letter sent to the Justice Department, the House Judiciary
Committee asked dozens of questions about the act's implementation. Despite
a committee-imposed deadline that passed last month, the department has yet
to reply. George Washington University's Turley points out that, so far, the
key arrests the Justice Department has made -- nabbing alleged top Qaeda
operative Abu Zubaydah, for example -- were done the old-fashioned way. "I'm
dubious," Turley said. "I think that the loosening-up of agents and
procedures is unlikely to produce better intelligence-gathering -- and it
could produce worse."

FBI Guidelines: C+
The new FBI guidelines announced in May have been a source of consternation
in civil-liberties circles. For the first time in 25 years, the guidelines
free agents to pursue preliminary investigations in public places. Civil
libertarians worry about the potential for repeats of the past abuses --
such as spying on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- that spawned the
now-discarded prohibition. But Litt calls the change sensible. "I'm not
terribly bothered by having the FBI attend public meetings," he added. "But
the question is: What use do they make of the information?" As with the
PATRIOT Act, the impact of the new guidelines will be difficult to measure
for years. Turley fears that the harms they do will be largely invisible.
"The new FBI guidelines create an enormous chilling effect for religious
observations," he said. "Muslims use their religious services to talk about
contemporary issues. Now every mosque will assume there is an FBI agent
there." But Doug Kmiec, who was White House counsel under President Reagan,
says less privacy in public is an acceptable cost. "That's one of the prices
of being at war," he said. He added that the FBI has to keep detailed
records of its actions and should be able to demonstrate that it used its
new authority to do more than just loiter in religious institutions.

Enemy Combatants: D-
The Bush administration's decision to classify certain American citizens as
"enemy combatants," jail them without formal charges, and deny them access
to a lawyer is causing the most alarm among legal scholars who are otherwise
sympathetic to the administration's anti-terrorism efforts. Two U.S.
citizens, Yasser Esam Hamdi, who was captured in November on the battlefield
in Afghanistan, and Jose Padilla, who was apprehended in Chicago in May and
is alleged to have plotted to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the
United States, are being held in military prisons as enemy combatants. The
government maintains that the classification is a wartime measure necessary
to extract information from the two men. Litt called the classification "a
good idea, poorly executed." He said the government would have more
credibility if it allowed enemy combatants who are American citizens to have
lawyers and if it subjected the process to judicial review.

Kmiec worries about the open-ended detention of American citizens who have
not been convicted of anything. "At some point, people are going to want to
know what exactly did interrogating Padilla and Hamdi... net you?" he said,
adding that he thinks the courts will force the government to make a
stronger case for holding U.S. citizens without access to counsel. Turley
argues that what the designation of U.S. citizens as enemy combatants has
netted so far is dismay -- both international and domestic -- because it
appears to violate the democratic values that America preaches to the world.
"The administration could have achieved a number of its practical objectives
without circumventing the current system," he said.

Profiling: C-
Despite the nation's general uneasiness about targeting anyone based on a
characteristic such as race or ethnicity, a growing number of experts say
that some level of profiling is acceptable -- and probably necessary in the
fight against terrorism. "This is a situation where 100 percent of the
people who did this were men of Middle Eastern origin," Litt noted. "There's
at least a rational evidentiary basis" for profiling. Problem is, the
government is wary of being accused of racial profiling, so its current
profiling efforts are too crude to be useful. In November, the State
Department instituted a 20-day waiting period for male visa applicants
between the ages of 16 and 45 who come from any of 26 Muslim countries, to
allow time for more-thorough background checks. Since January, male
applicants in that age group have been required to fill out a longer
questionnaire, aimed at gathering more information about the applicant's
background. Meanwhile, since 9/11, the Justice Department has interviewed
about 8,000 Middle Eastern men who were temporarily in the United States and
has begun requiring male visitors from high-risk countries -- initially
including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria -- to "register" with the U.S.
government by having their fingerprints and photo taken upon arrival. At
airports, the official policy still calls for random security checks.
"Because the government has avoided formal profiling programs, we have the
worst of all situations," according to Turley. "Individual officers are
effectively developing their own profiling systems. That's where the danger
is greatest to civil liberties." It's difficult, if not impossible, in any
case, to know whether profiling is accurately narrowing the pool of
potential terrorists. "You never really know when you're safe," Kerr said.
"All of this is playing the odds. We think the threat is pretty focused on a
certain crowd. If we focus on that crowd, it probably makes us somewhat
safer."

The War Abroad
Destroying Al Qaeda: B
In the beginning, there was resolve. Although the enormity of the September
11 terrorist attacks would have required dramatic action of any
administration, George W. Bush and his experienced national security team
struck just the right tone of targeted determination in the aftermath of the
tragedy. Almost immediately, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, his terrorist
network, were identified as the culprits. Their Taliban protectors in
Afghanistan were put on notice to surrender Al Qaeda's top leadership or
suffer the consequences. On October 7, less than a month after the terrorist
attacks, America unleashed its wrath with bombing attacks in Afghanistan.

The military campaign would soon grow to include 70,000 U.S. service members
in the Central Asian theater, two Navy carrier battle groups, and 7,000
Special Forces and light infantry troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
Fifteen coalition nations also contributed troops. Since February, U.S. and
coalition air forces have flown more than 36,000 sorties in support of
Operation Enduring Freedom, 21,000 of which were flown over Afghanistan. The
Pentagon estimates that the war costs $2 billion to $2.5 billion each month
-- a total of about $25 billion so far. Before 2001 was out, however, the
Taliban had fallen and those Qaeda terrorists not killed in the fighting had
mostly fled Afghanistan.

Denying Al Qaeda its Afghan sanctuary struck a severe blow to the terrorist
organization. Unlike the Irish Republican Army and certain other terrorist
groups, Al Qaeda had always depended on sanctuary to operate effectively,
either in Pakistan during the Afghan war of the 1970s, or in Sudan and
Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s. Remaining Qaeda leaders, now deprived of
friendly territory from which to operate bases for indoctrinating and
training recruits, are finding it difficult to reconstitute their battered
organization and to effectively plan and coordinate large-scale attacks.

But that doesn't mean they are defeated. Al Qaeda is still striking at U.S.
interests abroad and at those of friends and allies. Authorities have said
that Al Qaeda is behind, or has played a role in, many recent attacks, as
well as a few failed ones. The successful strikes include the June bombing
of the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, that killed 12 Pakistanis; the
May bombing of a bus in Karachi that killed 14 people, including 11 French
engineers; the April truck bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia that killed 19
people, including 14 German tourists; the March grenade attack in Islamabad,
Pakistan, that killed four Protestant International Church congregants,
including a U.S. Embassy employee and her daughter; and the January
kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl. The foiled
attacks include one by shoe-bomber Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an
airliner last December, and a plot uncovered in Morocco to strike U.S. ships
there. These scattered efforts may be the signs of a more decentralized Al
Qaeda, but not a destroyed one.

Nevertheless, the very fact that the group has been unable to pull off
another terrorist "spectacular," despite clear evidence of its desire to do
so using weapons of mass destruction, is a major achievement of the
anti-Qaeda campaign. "The disruption of Al Qaeda's command-and-control
center and denial of safe haven to the group has made it a much less
cohesive and effective organization," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA
counter-terrorism expert. "Bin Laden and his chief aides can no longer
tightly control their terror cells around the world or approve operations in
advance, significantly disrupting their operations."

The major black mark in the U.S.-led campaign against Al Qaeda is the
failure to capture bin Laden and his top aides. Some experts are especially
critical of the administration's decision to rely on Afghan militia, and not
U.S. forces, to close off escape routes in the mountains of Tora Bora last
December when evidence put bin Laden and his inner circle there. "Roughly 70
percent of the Qaeda leadership apparently escaped our campaign unharmed,
and there is evidence they are trying to reconstitute the organization,"
said Michael Swetnam, a counter-terrorism expert at the Potomac Institute
for Policy Studies. "So we did a poor job of decapitating this monster."

Foreign Intelligence Cooperation: A-
The unseen intelligence and law enforcement dragnet that President Bush
promised in the U.S.-led war against international terrorism surfaces mostly
in scattered news accounts: In July, U.S. Customs agents arrested suspected
Qaeda financier Omar Shishani as he arrived from Indonesia with $12 million
in false cashier's checks, and Canadian naval personnel captured suspected
Qaeda operatives in a boat off the coast of Pakistan. In June, Moroccan
officials arrested senior Qaeda operational planner Abu Zubair al-Haili. In
May, FBI agents arrested suspected Qaeda operative Jose Padilla as he
arrived in Chicago, reportedly to plan a radiological terrorist attack in
the United States. In March, after a fierce shoot-out, Pakistani authorities
captured senior Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaydah. Last December, police
in Singapore rolled up a suspected Qaeda cell of 13 operatives who were
plotting to bomb embassies of the United States, Israel, Britain, and
Australia.

The arrests are the result of an unprecedented level of international
intelligence-sharing and law enforcement cooperation that the United States
has helped orchestrate since the 9/11 attacks. "When you consider that there
is no more politically sensitive and potentially embarrassing issue than
internal security, the amount of quiet cooperation we have received from
around the world in terms of tracking down the Qaeda network has been very
gratifying," said Anthony Cordesman, a security expert at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "From our allies in
Europe, to governments in Russia, China, and Asia, and even among formerly
reluctant countries such as Sudan and Syria, we've seen broad support. And
the best way to keep that support is not to make noisy demands or issue
scorecards, but rather to let each country contribute as it sees fit."

In addition to the 12 top Qaeda leaders that U.S. officials say they have
captured or killed since September 11, and the 600 suspected Qaeda
operatives held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, another 1,500 or so have been
arrested around the world by police organizations. The problem, however, is
that 8,000 to 10,000 potential operatives passed through Qaeda training
camps and are currently scattered throughout the world.

"This is a ceaseless struggle that requires you to stay one step ahead of
the terrorists," said Bruce Hoffman, a counter-terrorism expert at the Rand
Corp. and an author. "The international dragnet, however, has forced Al
Qaeda -- from its leaders down to the foot soldiers -- to constantly look
over their shoulders and to spend as much time worrying about their own
survival as in plotting how to hurt us. That's critically important."

Ending State Sponsorship: B
"I promise you this: I will enforce the doctrine that says, 'If you house a
terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorists themselves,' " President
Bush said last October, when announcing a new policy aimed at denying global
terrorists safe haven or the succor of state sponsorship. The
administration's attempts to implement that doctrine over the past year have
certainly increased the calculated risks a state sponsor of terror must
consider, but they have also revealed the limits of U.S. power in ending the
terrorism scourge.

Exhibit A in the new Bush doctrine was the governing Taliban of Afghanistan,
which was toppled from power by U.S. military forces for offering safe haven
and protection to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. "Getting rid of the Taliban
was key to this campaign, partly because it was an incubator for a wide
variety of Islamic extremists that included Al Qaeda and terror groups
fighting in Chechnya, Kashmir, and Uzbekistan," said Jim Phillips, a
counter-terrorism expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think
tank in Washington. "Destroying the Taliban also delivered a very useful
message to other regimes that your sponsorship of terror groups may prove
much more costly in the future."

Of the seven nations on the State Department's list of terrorist sponsors,
four were most worrisome to the administration: Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and
Iran. Sudan was perhaps the first to take Bush's message to heart. Shortly
after the 9/11 attacks, the Sudanese government broke all ties with bin
Laden (who had based his operations there in the 1990s), detained more than
25 Qaeda suspects sought by the United States, and opened many of its
intelligence files to U.S. investigators.

Syria has not dropped its support of terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah,
associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because Damascus considers
them legitimate liberation movements. But Damascus has reportedly increased
its sharing of intelligence on Al Qaeda with the United States to
unprecedented levels.

Then there is Saddam Hussein. Until recently, the administration had gone
out of its way to say that the Iraqi leader is not linked to September 11.
But the White House views Iraq as unreconstructed because of its pursuit of
weapons of mass destruction and its ties to terrorist groups, and Saddam is
the target of a much-publicized Bush administration campaign for "regime
change."

Finally, Iran -- or at least certain elements in Iran -- remains the most
directly supportive of terror groups, offering temporary sanctuary to Qaeda
operatives fleeing neighboring Afghanistan. Many terrorism experts say that
the Bush team stumbled here. "After Iran offered qualified support to our
operations in Afghanistan, I think Bush clearly made a tactical mistake by
including it in his 'Axis of Evil' speech," said Vincent Cannistraro. "After
we publicly demonized Iran, it began to facilitate the movement of Al Qaeda
operatives through its territory."



NATIONAL SECURITY
Hardening The Targets
By Mark Murray, James Kitfield, Corine Hegland, Margaret Kriz, John Maggs,
Louis Jacobson, David Baumann, Carl M. Cannon, Alexis Simendinger, Neil
Munro, Shawn Zeller, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Aug. 9, 2002


If you start thinking like a terrorist, America presents so many targets
that it is hard to list them all. From movie theaters and sports stadiums to
car ferries and food supplies, this vast country has vulnerabilities
aplenty. The trick is figuring out which ones are more likely to be targets
than others and how much money is reasonable to spend to make them safer.
And those who think about these vulnerabilities also have to judge how much
freedom and liberty has to be surrendered for the sake of security. It's not
an easy task. But a lot of people, in government and in industry, are
working on it. And so far, the accomplishments are uneven.
Air Transportation
Transportation Security Administration: C
Most aviation experts agree that the nation's airport security is much
better than it was before September 11. And a year from now, they say, it
will be much better than it is today. But the system is certainly not
perfect today -- and unfortunately, it never will be.

One of the government's first post-9/11 actions was creating the
Transportation Security Administration last November to supervise security
for the nation's airways, railways, roadways, and waterways. Because of the
difficult airport security deadlines it faces later this year, however, the
TSA has spent most of its energy and resources on aviation.

The new agency, originally placed within the Transportation Department, has
been on a constant bureaucratic roller-coaster ride. In July, its chief,
John W. Magaw, was forced to resign after complaints over lack of progress
in meeting deadlines and over his poor communication with Congress and
aviation interests. Adm. James M. Loy, the former commandant of the U.S.
Coast Guard, has replaced Magaw. In addition, it's quite likely that the TSA
will move from the Transportation Department into the new Department of
Homeland Security.

While experts give the TSA high marks for its attempts to bolster security,
they say the agency has come up short in many areas. For example, government
tests show that screeners are still allowing too many prohibited items to
get past airport security checkpoints. The TSA has also been criticized for
moving too slowly in implementing two key provisions of last year's airport
security legislation: federalizing the workforce of screeners, and meeting
the deadline to screen all passenger bags through explosive-detection
machines.

But those shortcomings aren't entirely the TSA's fault. The deadlines and
standards that Congress set for the agency were ambitious and unprecedented.
As James K. Coyne, president of the National Air Transportation Association,
put it, "They're trying to pass a course that no one can pass."

Cockpit Doors: C+
Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the Federal Aviation
Administration established a rule mandating that the airlines secure their
cockpit doors, through either a deadbolt lock or a steel bar. That, however,
was just a stopgap measure. In January, the FAA passed another emergency
rule, which required the airlines to install bulletproof -- even
grenade-proof -- cockpit doors by April 2003.

Yet things got off to a slow start. Peggy Gilligan, the FAA's deputy
associate administrator for regulation and certification, says initial door
designs created pressurization problems in the cabin. But that was
eventually solved, and the FAA has approved designs for some of the major
Boeing and Airbus models. Gilligan says that installation of these doors has
finally begun.

But not everyone is optimistic that the deadline will be met. Michael
Wascom, spokesman for the Air Transport Association, which represents the
major air carriers, says that the models certified by the FAA account for
only about one-third of the fleet of ATA member companies. With the deadline
approaching, he said, the delay in certification "has greatly reduced the
time available to install these essential upgrades."

Another problem is the cost of the hardened doors, which is estimated to be
from $30,000 to $50,000 each. The airlines have complained that the
government hasn't given them enough money for the installation. Despite
these worries, the FAA's Gilligan says that the deadline will be met. "We
are not only optimistic," she said. "We are sure."

Air Marshalls: B+
This is the one security effort that has seen the most progress. On
September 11, the number of federal air marshals stood at fewer than 50.
Today, their ranks have exploded to a reported 2,000; however, the
Transportation Department maintains that the actual number is classified.
Air marshals receive 12 to 15 weeks of training -- in airports, at firing
ranges, and inside practice aircraft -- and they have the highest shooting
qualification standards of all law enforcement agencies.

At a recent congressional hearing, Michael P. Jackson, the Transportation
Department's deputy secretary, said that the department had established an
ambitious goal in November to expand the air marshal program, and that the
target is being met. "We have nailed those goals to the wall," he said.

Despite this apparent progress and the air marshals' impressive shooting
skills, one glaring shortcoming remains: There still aren't enough marshals.
Indeed, these marshals -- who usually work in pairs or in groups of three or
more -- ride on just a fraction of the nation's 35,000 daily flights. And
that's one reason why many in Congress and the aviation community have
pushed to allow pilots to carry guns in the cockpit.

Baggage Screening: D
Just two months after the airport security bill was signed into law, the TSA
had to meet its first big deadline: to be screening all passenger bags by
January 18, 2002. Despite Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta's doubts
about whether the TSA could meet that goal -- after all, the airlines had
been screening fewer than 5 percent of bags before the law's passage -- the
job got done through a hodgepodge of methods, such as positive bag-matches,
bomb-sniffing dogs, and screening by hand.

But the TSA now faces a tougher deadline: to ensure that all bags are being
checked through explosive-detection systems (EDS) or trace-detection
machines by December 31. To meet this goal, the TSA will need to deploy
1,100 EDS and 6,000 trace machines. The Transportation Department's
inspector general has noted that such an effort has never been attempted: It
represents three times the amount of such equipment currently deployed at
airports worldwide. As of July 9, only 215 of the EDS machines and 273 of
the trace machines were in use.

Airports must be reconfigured to fit the SUV-sized EDS machines, a job that
costs time and money. And operating the labor-intensive trace machines will
require a checked-baggage workforce of 21,600, which could crowd airport
lobbies and cause delays. Consequently, most observers don't believe the TSA
will meet the deadline. "They are a year away," said one transportation
lobbyist. "I don't think the equipment will be in place" by December 31.

The good news for the TSA is that the House extended this deadline by up to
a year in its recently passed Homeland Security Department bill. Whether
that extension becomes law, however, is still anyone's guess.

Passenger Screening: C+
Despite the intense scrutiny on airport screening, the system still has
plenty of holes. From November to February, the DOT inspector general's
office conducted tests at 32 airports and discovered that screeners failed
to detect knives, guns, and explosives in 48 percent of the tests. In
another round of tests the TSA conducted in June, screeners still failed to
find these prohibited items 24 percent of the time.

The administration, however, has been quick to counter that the screening
workforce in those tests hadn't yet been federalized; in most cases, the
screeners who failed these tests were the same ones who were working before
September 11. That is correct. The airport security legislation that was
signed into law last fall transferred control of the screening workforce
from the airlines to the federal government. Under the law, the TSA must
hire and deploy this workforce -- which is estimated to be 33,000 screeners
and managers -- by November 19, 2002.

Unfortunately, the TSA has been moving slowly. As of July 13, it had hired,
trained, and deployed only 2,475 screeners, just a fraction of the workforce
it envisions. To meet its goal, the TSA will have to hire and train more
than 7,600 screeners per month over the next four months. Yet according to
Mineta, the plan that DOT created to federalize this workforce was designed
to begin slowly, and it was understood that most of the hires would come
later in the process. In fact, the TSA says it has already hired 8,000
screeners. "We are on schedule," Mineta recently told Congress.

Crew Training/ Worker Security: C
Before September 11, terrorists had hijacked planes only to get to a foreign
country (such as Cuba), or to negotiate for something they desired (such as
release of prisoners). But the concept of a hijacking changed when
terrorists took control of American airliners and slammed them into the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Not surprisingly, pilots and flight
attendants have begun to rethink their approach to hijackings. Duane E.
Woerth, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, says that the pilots,
flight attendants, and airlines have worked together to develop a "common
strategy" to respond to future suicide hijackings. For security reasons, he
won't reveal the specifics, but Woerth explains that the strategy involves
enhancing communication among the pilots, flight attendants, and air
marshals.

But according to Patricia Friend, president of the Association of Flight
Attendants, not enough has been done on the training front, particularly
when it comes to flight attendants. While the airport security legislation
addressed flight-attendant training, Friend says the language wasn't
specific enough to improve things. She argues that in some cases airlines
have offered only two or three hours of additional training, and that "under
the current system, we are no better prepared to fight off an attacker in
the cabin than we were on September 11, and that is unacceptable." The
Association of Flight Attendants is currently supporting legislation in
Congress that would set detailed requirements for cabin crew training
programs.

The TSA has mandated that all airport workers with access to secure areas
undergo criminal background checks. Having committed any of some 30-odd
crimes will disqualify workers from employment. The TSA has until November
to complete these checks, although the agency says that most of them are
already completed.

But Friend finds plenty of holes in the system. She explains that because
many airports have employee entrances that provide access to the gates and
lobbies, anyone who can get inside the employee entrance has access to the
entire airport. Because there are no magnetometers at the employee
entrances, she said, people can show up with a photo ID, but "no one knows
what they are carrying."

On the other hand, some airline employees complain they are subjected to the
same random searches and checkpoints that all passengers must go through --
even though these employees have undergone background checks and have keys
to the cockpits. Such indiscriminate searching is "ridiculous," said Woerth.
"We treat every citizen as [a threat equal] to Mohamed Atta." The Air Line
Pilots Association and several airlines have been pushing the TSA to
introduce some sort of a universal ID card for airline employees that would
incorporate a retinal scan or fingerprint. The TSA has said it's considering
the proposal.

General Aviation/Small Airports: D
The TSA has established a classified security program for general aviation
operators. James Coyne, president of the National Air Transportation
Association, which represents general aviation interests, says his industry
has come up with its own security advice for operators in dealing with the
airport, the aircraft, and the people in the planes. In addition, since
September 11 general aviation operators have a heightened awareness about
security.

Still, the government hasn't been paying much attention to general aviation.
In testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Committee, the General Accounting Office noted that the TSA has set only a
few guidelines for GA security. Coyne doesn't think it should be that big a
priority, noting that the teenager who flew his plane into a skyscraper in
Tampa, Fla., in January didn't do much damage. "I don't think people feel
that GA is a significant threat," he said.

In addition to America's 429 commercial airports, thousands of smaller
airports and landing strips are scattered across the country. Because of the
small size of these facilities, the federal government hasn't done much to
improve their security. But after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, even these
small strips do seem to have a new sense of awareness about security.

Water Transportation
Cruise Ships and Ferries: B
Whether embarking from terminals in Hampton Roads, Va., Honolulu, Miami, or
New Orleans, cruise ship passengers today are witnessing a level of security
that would have been unthinkable before September 11. As their ships pull
away from the docks, passengers have noted the comforting presence of Coast
Guard escorts that enforce a 100-yard perimeter around cruise ships entering
or leaving port. Since 9/11, the Coast Guard has escorted more than 6,000
vessels in and out of port. Cruise ships, ferries, and any other large ships
that are identified as possible "high-risk" vessels under a classified
threat matrix system are also boarded by armed Coast Guard sea marshals, who
ensure that the ships are under authorized command-and-control. In the past
year, sea marshals have escorted 2,000-plus vessels.

Any suspicious boats that might pose a risk to cruise ships or ferries are
also far more likely to be boarded and investigated. Since 9/11, the Coast
Guard has conducted more than 35,000 port security patrols and more than
3,500 air patrols, boarding more than 10,000 vessels in the process. In New
York City harbor alone, the Coast Guard has boarded more than 2,000 vessels
since September 11. If there's credible intelligence that a port or vessel
is the target of a specific threat, the security presence will also likely
include one of the Coast Guard's new Maritime Safety and Security Teams --
rapidly deployable, waterborne SWAT teams with fast-response boats and heavy
tactical weaponry.

The increased patrolling is part of the largest port security operation
since World War II. The Coast Guard's waterborne measures are being matched
dockside at many of the country's ports, some of which have taken advantage
of $93.3 million in seaport security grants authorized last year by
Congress. This year, the House and Senate also passed comprehensive maritime
security bills, which are expected to be reconciled soon in a House-Senate
conference.

Despite improvements, experts concede that with 361 ports and 25,000 miles
of rivers and coastal waterways to protect, America remains vulnerable to
waterborne terrorist attack. "After the 9/11 attacks, the government's
primary effort was rightfully focused on the aviation sector, but now I
think we as a nation need to take a very hard look at our ports," said Coast
Guard Commandant Adm. Thomas Collins. "Our continuing concern is that the
U.S. ports and waterways remain very vulnerable."

Cargo Containers: D
In any inventory of America's vulnerabilities, container traffic entering
through U.S. ports is likely to top the list. The reason is a simple matter
of volume. Fully 95 percent of international goods shipped to the United
States enter through its seaports, and seaborne trade accounts for 25
percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Of that cargo, 90 percent moves
in the 40-foot-long metal cargo containers that can be seen stacked dozens
of stories high at major ports throughout the world. More than 200 million
such containers are now moving through the international trading network,
constituting the most critical component in the global trading system.

If it was learned that terrorists were using a cargo container to smuggle a
weapon of mass destruction into the United States, experts estimate that
screening the roughly 6 million cargo containers in the country on that day
could take up to six months. During that half-year, global commerce would
all but grind to a halt.

The Customs Service can manually screen only 2 percent of the containers
that enter the country, but officials have worked hard over the past year to
improve the intelligence fed into a threat matrix system that identifies
"high-risk" cargo for close inspection. The Customs Service has also
deployed additional X-ray and gamma-ray inspection devices for more-rapid
screening of containers, as well as nearly 4,000 radiation detectors that
its front-line agents use to check for nuclear weapons and weapons-grade
material.

By far the most ambitious plan to secure container traffic, however, is a
new Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism program that seeks to
establish a reliable "chain of custody" for all cargo. Such a system would
include assurances that a container was packed in a secure environment;
sealed so that its contents could not be tampered with while under way; and
was transported under the control of a certified and responsible shipper.

Experts concede that effectively implementing such a system will likely take
years and a new dynamic in global trade that weighs security on a par with
efficiency. "In terms of awareness of the problem -- and agreement on a
holistic solution that doesn't naively call for the inspection of every
container -- I think we're light-years ahead of where we were before 9/11,"
said Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "In
terms of tangible measures to solve this vulnerability, however, we haven't
done much. I would thus give the government a D, but with every hope that
we're working hard toward a better grade."

Land Transportation
Risk Assessment: C
Billions of dollars have been sunk into concrete, asphalt, and steel so that
people can move freely within the United States, and nobody wants to impede
that in the name of security. Yet transportation systems are an increasingly
popular target for terrorists across the globe, and governments want to
minimize vulnerabilities and maximize emergency response capabilities.

Current laws make the first task difficult: Federal and state disclosure and
liability laws provide an inherent disincentive for government agencies to
conduct thorough vulnerability assessments. "You don't want the results of
the assessment to become public information," says Ron Diridon, the
executive director of the Mineta Transportation Institute, a congressionally
chartered research organization. "But information provided by consultants to
those facilities is, under law, public information." Meanwhile, liability
laws allow an agency to be sued if it fails to address everything identified
in an assessment and somebody gets hurt. Both barriers can be worked around,
Diridon notes, but solutions make it harder to share important information
quickly.

Because American society is so open, experts say, it is almost impossible to
fully protect transportation systems against terrorism. Rather, the key to
improving security seems to be in improving the system's emergency
responses. The important thing, Diridon stresses, is to make sure that any
disaster response program is up-to-date and regularly practiced by all local
responders: transportation, fire, police, and emergency medical services.

Transit: B+
Transit agencies began buzzing about disaster preparedness after the 1995
chemical attack in Tokyo's subway, but they put their plans into high gear
after September 11. The Federal Transit Administration made $50,000 grants
available for emergency drills, and it has conducted vulnerability
assessments for the country's 32 largest agencies. Most municipalities have
taken simple steps, such as removing station lockers and trash bins, as well
as increasing surveillance on buses and trains. Metro in Washington is
piloting a new chemical-detection system at 12 stations, the first of its
kind anywhere in the world.

In general, though, old-fashioned people-watching remains the best
prevention tactic, says Paul Lennon, security chief of the Los Angeles
Metro. "There's a heightened awareness within each of the transit agencies,
from their front-line employees through top management, of their
vulnerabilities, and what each and every person can contribute to enhance
security."

The sheer number of people streaming in and out of any subway station during
a typical morning or evening rush hour makes it impossible to conduct
individual screenings of passengers and bags, Lennon says. "For a dollar,
dollar-and-a-half ride, they're just not going to tolerate it," he adds.

Amtrak: C
Amtrak has started running quick background checks on all of its passengers
and requiring a photo ID for everyone boarding a train, but the national
rail service's budget woes mean there's not a lot of money for restructuring
and upgrading existing security systems. Some Amtrak police officers are
pulling 12-hour shifts to provide increased surveillance. New York Gov.
George E. Pataki recently offered the state's National Guard to help out.
Amtrak has tried to increase visual checks on the heavily traveled Northeast
Corridor but, as was shown by the recent derailment of an Amtrak train in
Maryland -- which resulted from problems with the track and not from
terrorist actions -- there is a lot more track than there are eyes to watch
it.

Roads: B+
Getting on a train or a bus requires going through at least one checkpoint
-- the place where you buy your ticket. Getting on almost any highway, road,
bridge, or tunnel simply requires foot power or turning a key. "Highways
have always been considered invincible, and we hadn't worried about
terrorists," says Tony Kane, director of engineering and technical services
for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

Today, concrete and steel seem a lot less invincible. State transportation
departments have been running new vulnerability assessments during the past
year. The country has about 600,000 transportation structures, from two-lane
country bridges to the Golden Gate Bridge, and about 500 are considered
significant. States are using various devices to protect these structures,
from surveillance cameras to new supporting columns in tunnels. The states
are also considering building protective structures around bridge piles to
forestall a water attack.

In general, though, officials worry most about responding properly to a
disaster. That, says Kane, depends on good communication, not roads. "A lot
more emphasis has to be spent on the emergency response system," he says.
The association estimates that the nation's highway systems need $4 billion
to strengthen road and emergency communication, and another $2 billion on
physical protection measures.

Energy
The nation's energy infrastructure, which the White House identified shortly
after September 11 as dangerously vulnerable, has begun to adopt new
safeguards. Companies have boosted security at nuclear power plants, oil
refineries, and electricity-generating facilities. And President Bush has
increased the oil supplies that the federal government holds in reserve, a
move that could lessen the economic impact of an oil supply disruption in
the Middle East.

But serious shortcomings remain. The nation's electric power grid and its
oil and natural gas pipelines remain precariously vulnerable to attack, and
some observers say that little can be done to protect them as they
crisscross the nation. The Bush administration says that transferring
nuclear waste to one central storage location will make the nuclear power
industry safer, but putting that solution into action will taken another
decade -- and 9/11 has exacerbated safety concerns about transporting the
waste over the nation's highways and rail lines. The U.S. energy sector is
safer than it was when terrorists attacked New York City and the Pentagon,
but significant additional improvements are needed.

Nuclear Power: B-
Within an hour after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, officials at the nation's
104 commercial nuclear power plants tightened security. Then, in February,
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered plant owners to beef up security
even further. The commission's order, much of which was kept secret,
required plants to increase patrols, widen security zones, and toughen
security checks on visitors and employees -- steps that industry officials
say many firms have now taken. "The level of security at nuclear power
plants is the highest it's ever been," said Mark Findlay, director of
security at Nuclear Management, which provides security at several
facilities.

The NRC has offered to provide states with potassium iodide tablets, which,
if taken immediately by those exposed to a radiation release, can prevent
thyroid cancer. In the event of such a disaster, the pills are to be made
available to citizens living within 10 miles of the plants -- although
critics say the danger zone can extend 50 miles.

Nuclear-industry officials are touting a recent study indicating that a
large commercial jetliner deliberately flown into a nuclear plant would not
crack the reactor vessel or cause a radiation leak. But watchdog groups
argue that a plane could do serious damage to a reactor's safety systems.
Critics note that the study neglected to consider the impact of a
shoulder-fired missile. Despite the industry's assurances, Congress is
considering legislation that would force the commission to get tougher on
nuclear facilities. Congressional critics object that the NRC allows
companies to assume that an attack on their plants would be carried out by a
few terrorists who are not heavily armed and not suicidal. "Since September
11, we have to assume that those assumptions are seriously wrong," said Rep.
Edward J. Markey, D-Mass.

Nuclear Waste: D
The Bush administration boasts that nuclear power plants will be much safer
after the Energy Department transfers 45,000 metric tons of radioactive
waste from 104 commercial nuclear power plants and 14 closed facilities to
an underground repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Some 161 million
Americans live within 75 miles of those power plants. Earlier this summer,
Congress and the White House authorized the Yucca Mountain waste dump.
Nevada state officials are continuing to fight that decision.

But the Nevada repository, which the Energy Department spent 20 years and $4
billion studying and beginning to build, won't open until 2010 at the
earliest. And critics of the plan charge that moving the waste to Nevada
would create serious new safety threats, because the material would be moved
on rail lines and highways close to major cities. Only a few tests have been
conducted on what could happen if terrorists attacked a nuclear-waste
shipment, and the results of those tests are disputed. Opponents say the
shipments would be vulnerable to accidents and terrorist attacks. "There are
great questions about the government's ability to guarantee the security of
transporting this material through communities and states across the
country," Markey argued. Meanwhile, each year, the nation's nuclear power
plants produce roughly 2,000 metric tons of new waste, which remains too
radioactive to move off-site for five years. Nuclear power now produces 20
percent of the nation's electricity. As long as nuclear reactors continue to
operate, a substantial amount of radioactive waste will have to be stored
near them.

Markets and Strategic Supplies: B
Experts generally agree that the biggest threat of terrorism against the
U.S. energy sector is not a violent attack on some facility but a
coordinated sabotage effort that drives up energy prices and imperils the
U.S. economy. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the United States increased the
"fill rate" of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the government-owned cache
of crude oil that is stored in underground salt formations in the South. The
reserve now holds about 600 million barrels. Europe and Japan together hold
the same amount.

Energy economist and consultant Philip Verleger said that might sound like a
lot but really isn't. "It represents about four months of imports from Saudi
Arabia," he said. Verleger emphasized that there are many terrorism
scenarios in which the reserve could prove inadequate. For example, an Iraqi
attack might disable Saudi Arabia's oil production for far longer than four
months. And if a U.S. attack on Iraq involved Israeli participation, that
could easily trigger a broader Middle Eastern oil embargo.

The good news is that global oil production is much more diverse than it was
during the oil crises of the 1970s. The bad news is that U.S. production has
continued to lag behind demand and that conservation efforts were set back
by the low prices and good times of the 1990s. However, U.S. oil production
will never be able to sustain the American economy, so there is no
substitute for a foreign policy that protects shipping and keeps Middle
Eastern oil flowing to the United States.

Oil and Gas Pipelines: B
Early on, the Bush administration identified oil and natural gas pipelines
as critical links in the nation's infrastructure that would be natural
targets for a terrorist attack. Rather than seeking more regulation, the
government has asked for industry input about how to improve safety and has
been reviewing that information since last fall. Industry and government
have earned good marks for getting this process moving and for working
together. Yet the voluntary, decentralized nature of the process does not
ensure that all pipeline operators will observe the highest standards. And
the government has not yet issued its safety guidelines.

Two notable acts of sabotage have damaged the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System,
which carries 1 million to 2 million barrels of crude oil every day from the
state's North Slope to refineries in southern Alaska. In 1978, shortly after
the pipeline opened, vandals used a small amount of conventional explosive
to blow up a section of the line, causing a 700,000-barrel spill.

The pipeline's second-largest spill, in October 2001, seems laughably small
by comparison. Only 6,800 barrels were lost. But in its way, it was even
more disturbing than the first because it was caused by a lone gunman firing
a single bullet through the double-walled steel of the pipeline. Daniel
Carson Lewis, 37, was arrested, but it took 36 hours to stop the leak.
Afterward, security experts, including former CIA Director James Woolsey,
testified that the Alaska pipeline and others in remote locations are very
vulnerable to terrorist sabotage, since patrolling the thousands of miles of
petroleum pipelines that crisscross North America is impossible. In densely
populated areas, most pipelines are underground, making them more difficult
to attack.

Oil Refineries, Tank Farms: B-
U.S. oil refineries process huge volumes of volatile and toxic chemicals.
Mishaps at refineries have caused some of the nation's worst industrial
accidents, and these facilities would be a logical target for terrorists.
Fortunately, oil refineries have faced the risks of accidents and sabotage
before -- and they generate enough profits to prompt their owners to invest
in expensive safeguards. But the self-regulatory approach to safety that
dominates federal oversight of the industry makes it impossible to assess
the security of these thousands of facilities. Clearly, oil companies have
taken some independent actions since September 11, but a comprehensive list
of government recommendations is still being compiled.

Back when he was chief executive of Halliburton, Vice President Cheney
headed up a cyber-security task force of the industry-sponsored National
Petroleum Council. The task force found that cyber-technologies posed
significant new risks for the oil industry and that an entire new level of
security was needed to protect against them. Oil companies stepped up their
pace in adopting these measures after 9/11, but it is not clear how
extensive and intensive the changes have been. After the terrorist attacks,
the Department of Transportation had to use the telephone to contact 1,000
oil and gas companies and those working with hazardous materials. Since
then, the use of e-mail for communicating alerts from the Office of Homeland
Security has increased, but the phone system still plays an important role.

Electric Utilities: C
Keeping the lights on in America means protecting against both physical
attacks on the electric grid and cyber-attacks on the computers that operate
the system. The physical grid, which includes everything from the
high-voltage wires that stretch across the countryside to the electric
substations crammed into cities, was not built with sabotage in mind. "We
all have electric systems that we built in the sunshine, in a country built
in the sunshine," said John M. Derrick Jr., CEO of Pepco Holdings, which
supplies power to 1.8 million customers from New Jersey to Virginia. "Now
all of a sudden, it's a concern."

A National Research Council report warned this June, "The most insidious and
economically harmful attack would be one that exploits the vulnerabilities
of an integrated electric power grid." To prevent such an attack,
electric-industry officials say they have boosted surveillance and installed
new physical barriers. Meanwhile, experts are improving ways to reroute
electricity around an outage. Critics say the industry should also lessen
the potential impact of an attack by taking the costly steps of expanding
the nation's transmission system and maintaining backup emergency power
plants.

On the brighter side, before the new millennium, the industry had made
massive investments in protecting its computer equipment, in response to
fears that software systems would fail when their internal calendars
switched from 1999 to 2000. Now, the Energy Department's national
laboratories are testing the cyber-security at some electric companies and
are recommending further improvements. Nonetheless, Derrick said, computer
hackers are sure to continue to try to break into the computer systems that
run the nation's electric grid.

Infrastructure
Agriculture: C
This summer, seven states took part in a disaster drill to see what would
have happened if a hypothetical Missouri farmer had accidentally brought
foot-and-mouth disease in from Argentina on July 10. If the farmer had
infected, and then sold, his bulls, animals in 28 states would have been
exposed to the disease within 12 hours of the sale. Within 48 hours, the
first reports of limping and drooling livestock would have trickled into
state veterinarian offices. By July 21, only 11 days after the disease had
hypothetically crossed the border, the Agriculture Department's
foreign-disease laboratory on Plum Island, N.Y., would have confirmed the
first outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease on American soil in 70 years.

If the scenario of the Missouri farmer had been real, most of the $90
billion American livestock industry would have been wiped out by now.

The drill, which was run by the Central States Animal Emergency Coordinating
Council, with USDA emergency funds, showed just how easily chance or malice
could devastate U.S. agriculture. Many security actions taken over the past
year, such as strengthening border inspections and making it harder for
strangers to wander onto farms, reduce the odds of an attack -- but not by
much.

Destroying a nation's farm industry is "technologically simple to execute
and doesn't need to be successful to have a [significant] economic impact,"
according to bioterrorism expert Rocco Casagrande, who designs and tests
detectors for biological warfare agents with Surface Logix, a private
research company.

The key, Casagrande says, is in the country's procedures for handling and
containing attacks. But the July drill showed that American protections are
still haphazard. At the time of the drill, only one state, North Carolina,
had procedures in place that called for notifying all other states the
moment the state's veterinarian suspected a case of foot-and-mouth disease.
In the exercise, some of the other states remained silent until it was too
late to control the outbreak.

To be sure, some procedures have been improved since September 11. New labs
coming on line are expanding the country's testing capacity, and the USDA
has accelerated a plan to help protect ranchers against quarantine losses,
thereby encouraging faster reporting of disease. But key steps, such as
developing a shared communications network for use by the states and the
USDA, and increasing the frequency of the USDA's training in identifying
foreign diseases, have yet to be taken.

Food: B
Using food to kill people is very difficult, because processing your dinner
through cooking, salting, or irradiating destroys most bacteria. Any
critters that make it onto your plate might cause gastrointestinal
unpleasantness, but they are unlikely to kill you.

The food industry has become much more vigilant about securing its
ingredients and its machines from outsiders, and the number of USDA food
inspectors has increased from last year.

Still, says David Siegrist, the director of the Potomac Institute's Studies
for Countering Biological Terrorism, our food supply remains vulnerable. "A
large fraction of U.S. fruits and vegetables come in from abroad," he says,
"where not even the safeguards that we have here would apply." Furthermore,
he points out, accidental contaminations, such as the one that triggered
last month's ConAgra beef recall, prove that the U.S. system is still
vulnerable to diseases. "If you're doing it inadvertently, then it stands to
reason that if somebody intended to do it, they could."

Water: B
A violent extremist group known as The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of
the Lord surrendered to the FBI in 1985, giving up 30 gallons of cyanide and
a vague intention to poison a city's water while praying that only "those
who were meant to die would be poisoned." If the extremists had succeeded in
dumping the poison into a reservoir, some fish might have been hurt, but
that's about it.

U.S. water supplies are difficult to attack directly. The stuff streaming
out of your faucet comes from reservoirs, which are already large virulent
cesspools, and tipping in a few more chemicals wouldn't have much impact.
Reservoir water goes through extensive, and redundant, treatment processes
before entering underground pipes for distribution. It's difficult, but not
impossible, to introduce a contaminant after purification, but even then, it
would be diluted by the sheer volume of water coursing through the pipes.

All U.S. water authorities have begun vulnerability assessments since
September 11. The big plants will finish their assessments by December 2002,
and the smaller plants should be finished by December 2003. In addition,
most plants have significantly tightened security by ending tours,
installing new alarms and gates, screening drivers, hiring more guards, and
tightening access points and procedures. But these steps just address the
obvious risks, says Milwaukee's water superintendent, Carrie Lewis. "The
smart terrorists know all this now, and the water utilities are smarter than
the dumb terrorists," she says.

In testimony before a House subcommittee last summer, U.S. Assistant
Attorney General Michael Chertoff suggested that the risk of a cyber-attack
opening a dam's floodgates was graver than the risk of a physical attack. He
said that a juvenile hacker had broken into the computers controlling
Arizona's Roosevelt Dam.

Jack Hoffbuhr, executive director of the American Water Works Association,
says officials are trying to figure out the extent of the industry's
electronic vulnerabilities now. "A lot of water utilities wouldn't be
impacted, because they run internal loops," he says, "but other water
utilities use systems that connect to other networks," and so could be
accessed by a hacker.

The bottom line, says David Dobbins, a water expert at security consulting
firm Black and Veatch, is that nobody has a good handle on how vulnerable
the nation's water infrastructure is. "We don't have a history to gauge this
on," he says.

Public Places
Protecting Against Suicide Bombers: D
Security measures in public places have been stepped up since September 11
-- including more uniformed security officers, tighter controls over
ventilation systems, and new parking rules near sensitive buildings -- but
our public places remain extremely attractive targets for terrorists.
Because Americans want openness as well as safety, almost no one recommends
surrounding every shopping mall, sports arena, and office building with a
cordon of metal detectors and bomb-sniffing devices.

Michael Swetnam, a terrorism expert at the Potomac Institute for Policy
Studies, believes that overall, the country is less safe than before the
terrorist attacks. "September 11 demonstrated to everyone in the world how
easy it is to slip into a sports facility or an entertainment venue and
cause us grave harm," he says.

If a flurry of individual, Palestinian-style suicide bombers struck the
United States, America's public spaces could become exceedingly dangerous,
analysts say. Experts such as Swetnam and former CIA Director James Woolsey
don't foresee a wave of suicide bombings in the United States. Groups such
as Al Qaeda have specialized in spectacular attacks on symbolic targets,
preferring, it seems, to topple the Washington Monument and cause only a few
casualties, than to incinerate hundreds of people in an anonymous movie
theater.

Woolsey added that suicide bombings "require a subculture that encourages
and trains people.... I think that would be very hard to do in this
country."

Other experts, however, worry about the threat of suicide bombers sponsored
by groups other than Al Qaeda. John Cohen of PSComm, a security consulting
firm, notes that attacks on malls, restaurants, and other places where
people gather could "injure or kill a large number of people, will make a
statement critical of American consumer life, and cause widespread fear and
disruption."

Cohen says that the state and local officials he works with are unimpressed
by the federal government's efforts and have begun to set up their own
information-sharing alliances. For personnel and budgetary reasons, many
cities rely more on private security forces than on their police departments
to protect major gathering places, said Frank Fairbanks, the city manager of
Phoenix, Ariz. And Mortimer Downey, who served as deputy Transportation
secretary under President Clinton, said, "There are no simple technologies
for securing big public spaces."

Shopping Malls: C+
Shopping malls have taken a number of steps to improve security, said
Malachy Kavanagh, a spokesman for the International Council of Shopping
Centers. Though the upgrades vary, uniformed patrols by both police and
private security have generally increased, and barriers to stop car bombs
have become more common. Mall owners have also installed more surveillance
cameras, instituted more-restrictive parking rules, locked down ventilation
systems and internal corridors, and required tenants to abide by stricter
rules governing the delivery of goods and packages, Kavanagh said.

Yet shopping malls remain one of the softest targets imaginable for an
industrious terrorist. A chemical or biological attack could spread quickly
there. And while casualty rates from a single bomb might be low, preventing
even one attack would be hard: The flow of pedestrians can never be
monitored very closely; each mall includes many exits and entrances; and
most visitors carry bags that could easily conceal an explosive device. And
because virtually all Americans visit malls, the terror factor from a single
attack would be multiplied greatly.

Skyscrapers: B
Owners of large buildings -- who have already seen their properties targeted
by terrorists on several occasions -- have been among the most active in
setting higher security standards. A survey conducted for the Building
Owners and Managers Association International and the Urban Land Institute
found that most owners of commercial buildings have added security cameras,
increased security personnel, and either installed or more rigidly enforced
card-access systems.

Interest in security within the industry has been high: An October
conference call on security attracted 3,500 participants, said Ron Burton,
BOMA's vice president of advocacy and research. The most common improvement
has been a tighter leash on vendors, including requirements for background
checks, identification, and check-in procedures.

Protecting skyscrapers isn't easy, however, because many have shopping malls
or atriums, forcing security personnel to keep tabs on the general public,
not just employees. Many big buildings also have underground parking
garages, which carry the risk of car bombs. High-profile "trophy buildings"
such as Chicago's Sears Tower pose special risks, but the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing proved that nondescript buildings can be targets, too.

In the wake of the collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers,
building-evacuation procedures are also getting a hard look. Historically in
high-rise fires, the practice has been to evacuate one floor below the fire
and four above it, to allow for an efficient evacuation. But now, building
and fire officials are rethinking that standard. Studies by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology and other organizations are under way,
but it's too early to come up with answers, said Randy Bruegman, the
president-elect of the International Association of Fire Chiefs.

Ultimately, much of the responsibility for protecting skyscrapers falls to
those other than building owners, such as aviation security officials. "The
only way to do it is to prevent the attack in the first place," Swetnam
said.

Stadiums: B-
Measured purely by the scope of potential casualties, sport stadiums packed
with people are seen as a prime target for terrorists. But other factors
work against this logic. Psychologically, stadiums are more like airports
than shopping malls for most Americans; because a trip to a stadium is a
special event, most people feel it's worth putting up with extensive
security checks. Another factor is that stadiums are designed to help a mass
of patrons exit as quickly as possible. And short of a nuclear, biological,
or chemical attack, stadiums are sufficiently sprawling that a conventional
explosive might not kill many people.

Even so, sports leagues aren't taking the threat lightly. While specific
upgrades have been left to local stadium authorities, the National Football
League has put security near the top of its agenda, said Greg Aiello, the
NFL's vice president for public relations. The league called in an outside
consultant, Guardsmark, to assess every team's stadium security measures,
and established a task force to establish and distribute best-practices
guidelines on such matters as pat-downs of patrons, bans on coolers and
large bags, uniformed security staffing, tighter controls on concessionaires
and deliveries, and a closer lookout for possible intruders in the days
before a game. In conjunction with Major League Baseball and the Division
1-A Athletic Directors Association, the NFL has been lobbying the Federal
Aviation Administration to ban overflights by private planes.

Swetnam says the risk of a stadium attack is relatively low, but he
describes current security measures as "hit-and-miss." He concluded, "Very
large events like the Super Bowl are done very well, but routine events
strike me as spotty at best."

Movie Theaters: F
In theory, movie theaters shouldn't be too hard to protect from conventional
bombs: There's just one way to get inside a theater, and patrons would
probably accept a metal-detector check if they began to fear for their
safety. In practice, though, theaters appear to have done little to boost
their safety level. Specifics are slim; the National Association of Theatre
Owners referred all calls to member companies, and none of the companies
returned reporters' calls. But outsiders say that the theater business
muddles through with low profit margins and tight constraints on the timing
of shows, making expensive changes and potential delays unpopular within the
industry. And because there has been no terrorist incident in an American
movie theater, the impetus for change -- at least for now -- is weak.

New York City Targets: B
Since taking over as New York City police commissioner in January, Ray Kelly
has taken several steps to increase security in the Big Apple. He created a
counter-terrorism bureau headed by retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Frank
Libutti and named 35-year CIA veteran David Cohen to run the police
intelligence unit. The department now has personnel proficient in more than
40 languages, including Pashto, Urdu, and Arabic. All uniformed officers
must go through counter-terrorism training -- lessons that are also offered
to civilians. "Hercules" units -- heavily armed officers riding in armored
SUVs -- roam throughout the city. Perhaps most important, the NYPD hired
2,500 recruits who are in training and slated to hit the streets by January
2003.

Michael Swetnam, who has been advising New York City officials, said the
city has made significant strides. Still, he points out that, even more so
than previously, New York's landmark buildings represent the symbolic heart
of America. Moreover, between 1 percent and 2 percent of the city's
population at any given time is made up of temporary residents from foreign
countries. On the upside, Swetnam said, New York has taken the right
approach to gauging the risks and acting on them. "The city has done a very
good job -- because it feels threatened," he said.

The Federal City
The Shadow Government: ?
A parallel government operates at two bunker locations in Virginia and
Pennsylvania. The people there are tasked with managing the country's food,
water, and energy supplies, as well as transportation needs, medical and
health emergencies, communications networks, and civilian peacekeeping
during any catastrophic incident that disables federal operations in
Washington. Reconstructing the constitutional government after destruction
or maiming of the capital would also be the task of the staff and officials
assigned to the bunkers. "You have to have people there who really know the
functions of government," explained one administration official.

The Bush administration has assigned 75 to 100 senior civil servants and
some political appointees to staff the bunker locations on a rotation basis,
pulling shifts of about 90 days, indefinitely. In general, the
administration's continuity-of-government (COG) plans envision three phases:
activation and relocation within 12 hours; operation of the alternative
facilities after about 12 hours, until a threat to governance ends; and the
reconstitution of government, followed by normal federal operations. As a
result of the new emphasis being placed on COG operations, the Bush
administration is making improvements to the facilities and their
technology.

One Washington consultant who spoke with a Bush appointee while the official
was tucked away doing his time in one of the secure locations said the
administration contact described "a lot of people who looked like they had
been there for 30 years and were so happy to have company!"

All funding for and operations of COG are considered classified.
"Unfortunately, we're not commenting...for reasons of national security,"
said FEMA spokeswoman Deborah Garrett. FEMA coordinates the COG, primarily
through its National Preparedness Directorate.

During the Clinton administration, under FEMA's direction, the 1950s-vintage
shadow-government bunkers were updated with computers, videoconferencing and
improved telecommunications, new paint, and daybeds to replace sleeping
cots, said former FEMA Director James Lee Witt in an interview. "It was like
doom and gloom in there. We redid the entire thing," Witt said, recalling
one of the bunker locations, which was equipped with manual Underwood
typewriters. "We replaced the water," he added. "There was still the water
[President] Johnson had put in there, bottled water in glass bottles from
Mountain Valley water, from Hot Springs, Ark.... It was unreal."

White House, Pentagon, and CIA Headquarters: ?
In making federal facilities safer, say White House, Pentagon, and CIA
officials, it's important not to discuss security. So they won't. "That's
not something I can help you with," said Paul Nowack, a CIA spokesman.

At the White House, deputy press secretary Scott McClellan said, "If you see
something, we might comment." Otherwise, mum's the word. In the aftermath of
September 11, the vice president and the president did not work in the same
place at the same time. The president's daily schedule was closely held.
White House public tours were initially halted, then resumed for student
groups and guests escorted by a member of Congress or congressional staff,
but not for everyone else. Extra precautions were taken against anthrax or
other contamination in mail or hand-delivered packages destined for the
White House complex, which includes buildings other than the iconic
residence itself. Secret Service agents and officers -- on foot, on bikes,
in cars, on roofs, around the president -- are now not the least bit
reluctant to be visible at all times.

White House staff members have improved emergency response procedures for
themselves, and worked out destinations and communications should they be
forced to evacuate their offices on foot again. The White House offices
along the 17th Street side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building have
been vacated under recommendations of the Secret Service because of presumed
vulnerability from the air; those employees must work in modern office
quarters on 18th Street, a block away. All visitors to the White House
complex now must be escorted from the point of the Secret Service check-in.
No stragglers or wanderers are allowed.

At the Pentagon, a new, reinforced section of the building will soon be
completed, replacing the area where the hijacked airplane crashed and
burned. Admission of vehicles and people into the building is even more
restricted than it once was, and Metrobuses arriving at the Pentagon subway
hub must pick up and drop off passengers at a spot more distant. Security
vehicles, with lights flashing, linger at I-395 turnoff lanes, to provide a
visual deterrent. Military police officers are everywhere -- checking bags,
standing guard.

Monuments: B
Of the 385 sites managed by the National Park Service, only four have seen
security appreciably upgraded since September 11, NPS officials report. The
four are the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell
Pavilion in Philadelphia, and the Arch of St. Louis. "Essentially, we have
airport security at those locations," says David Barna, chief of public
affairs for the NPS. "Visitors go through the magnetometers, are subject to
searches with handheld wands, that sort of thing."

At those four sites, as well as at all the downtown Washington monuments,
the U.S. Park Police have also beefed up the presence of uniformed officers.
All the downtown D.C. monuments, as well as the Smithsonian museums, are
surrounded by the kind of concrete "Jersey" barriers that began showing up
around the White House and other Washington sites after the deadly 1983
bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon. Following 9/11, they
sprouted like flowers and are deployed along the Mall -- in rings -- to
prevent a truck attack.

The unsightly barriers have become an aesthetic issue, so the National
Capital Planning Commission has undertaken a swift study on how to
incorporate security into the design of the monuments. The public comment
period was set to end on September 9, but there is talk of extending it. The
general impression, said one federal official who sat in on the meetings, is
that the temporary measures being taken are "reasonably adequate" for
security purposes, but utterly inadequate from the artistic standpoint.

Martha Droge, a landscape architect with the Baltimore firm of
Ayers/Saint/Gross, gives high marks to the National Capital Planning
Commission's long-term blueprint -- and she may be uniquely qualified to
judge. She was a special agent with the State Department's Diplomatic
Security Bureau before making a career change. "That report is an excellent
example of how a new design can incorporate security upgrades while still
making a positive contribution to public space."

It won't come cheaply. The plan envisions the government spending up to $800
million in what it calls "a worst-case scenario." But only deeper study will
determine whether that guesstimate is even close to correct. The commission
expects to ask Congress for $32 million just do to this study.

"We can have both good urban design and good security, but now we have
neither," said Richard L. Friedman, the Boston-based developer who chaired
the task force that put together the blueprint.

Safety of Federal Employees: C+
One of the painful lessons of September 11 is that if famous buildings
become targets, so do the men and women who work in them. This is true of
government buildings in Washington and around the nation. "Capitol buildings
are symbols of government, and the people who inhabit them are symbols,
too," says Tony Beard, chief sergeant at arms for the California state
Senate. In Sacramento, the Legislature is spending $4 million to $5 million
to make the state Capitol more secure after a suicidal ex-convict with a
history of mental problems rammed his rig into the edifice at 45 miles an
hour.

Here in Washington, unfettered access to government buildings is all but a
remnant of another time -- even in buildings designed to be
tourist-friendly. The Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, for instance,
was refurbished as a shopping mall and reopened amid fanfare during the
Reagan administration. Today, entry to that building is so restricted that
tourists are becoming scarce. "It's gotten quite tight, so much so that it's
become quite difficult for the merchants to operate," says Martha Catlin,
program analyst for the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which is
housed there.

Officials of federal employees unions say that they appreciate the upgraded
security but cite a few caveats. One is that there doesn't appear to be much
uniformity. "I travel a good deal, and some federal buildings I just walk
right in, while in others they won't let me past the front desk without
being escorted," says Colleen Kelley, national president of the National
Treasury Employees Union.

Another caveat, as always, is money. "More thought and attention is being
paid to making federal workers safe than ever before, but in some cases the
problem is going to be funding," Kelley says. "Hopefully, the focus will
stay on this without it taking another tragedy."

Capitol Hill: B
Take one walk across Capitol Hill and you can clearly see that new security
measures have been put in place since September 11 -- funded by $613 million
provided in fiscal 2002 emergency spending bills. Vehicles no longer can
drive on streets around Hill office buildings, and most truck traffic has
been barred from the area. The Capitol plaza is a mess, with new blockades
in place and construction beginning on the new Capitol Visitor Center. While
the center had been planned before 9/11, it gained new urgency after the
attacks; Congress decided to provide additional federal funds for the
project, rather than relying on a private fundraising effort. The visitor
center, which will allow the Capitol Police to funnel all visitors though a
three-story underground facility, is scheduled to be completed in 2005 -- at
a cost of as much as $300 million.

Until then, temporary buildings have been constructed on the House and
Senate sides for receiving visitors. New restrictions have been placed on
visitors. Tourists can no longer wander unescorted through much of the
Capitol, but must be escorted on guided tours. Gas masks are being
distributed to members and staff, and as a result of the anthrax letters
sent to the Hill last year, all mail is being irradiated -- causing delays
in mail distribution. Capitol Police have been directed to examine staff and
press credentials more closely when people enter buildings, although based
on anecdotal evidence, those inspections vary in thoroughness.

D.C. Evacuation Plans: D
The District has an evacuation plan in place, although few people know it.
The city has not yet publicized it -- even though people attempting to leave
the District on September 11 ran into huge traffic jams, and it was never
clear which mass transit services were still operating. The District's
Internet site states that 14 "corridors" have been identified to funnel
traffic out of the city to the Beltway and beyond. During emergencies,
traffic lights on those roads will be retimed, and police will be stationed
at some 70 intersections.

While signs have been placed along the evacuation routes, the plan has not
yet been publicized, according to a spokesman for the District's
transportation department. Officials want to ensure that all area
governments are aware of the plan before it is publicized in a brochure,
which will be distributed throughout the area. "It just takes time," the
spokesman said, adding that District officials will attempt to ensure that
all residents and workers are informed of the evacuation plan within the
next few months.

Mass transit also will play a large role in any evacuation, although again,
final plans have not yet been adopted. Transportation officials must ensure
that all area transit services can be coordinated, so that commuters do not
find themselves stranded. For instance, officials must ensure that bus
service is available for commuters at the end of each Metrorail route.
Discussions among the various transit services are continuing, a District
official said, conceding that plans are not 100 percent in place yet.

Business and Industry
American business gets a grade of C, based on the potent and largely unmet
threat of a catastrophic attack on the facilities of the U.S. chemical
industry, and the increasingly complex problems of cyber-security. The
banking industry does a little better, probably because of the federal
government's efforts soon after September 11 to plug holes that had allowed
the financing of Al Qaeda's global terror network.

Business Cyber-Security: C
Opinion is split on the question of whether U.S. businesses are better
prepared to deal with widespread hacker attacks now than they were a year
ago. In a survey of 602 professionals in the information-technology
business, 52 percent said that corporate defenses have improved a little,
while 36 percent said little has changed. Five percent said defenses are
much better, and 4 percent said they were worse, according to the survey,
released July 24 by the Business Software Alliance, a trade association of
software companies, including Microsoft. "We are not devoting the kind of
resources" that are needed, said Robert Holleyman, BSA's president.

But other Washington-based experts say that senior business leaders are now
paying much greater attention to the terrorist-hacker problem, and that
results will be seen over the next few years. "They are looking at it in a
much more global way than before," said Robert McNamara, a partner at Manatt
Jones Global Strategies, an international consulting group. Under pressure
from administration officials, corporate leaders have set in motion a number
of efforts that will take years to generate results -- top-level auditing of
security threats, new software to weigh security vulnerabilities, tougher
pressure on subcontractors to bolster their own information security -- but
business has not yet achieved obvious improvements in anti-hacker defenses,
nor significantly increased spending on security. Congress may soon give
industry more leeway to cooperate with law enforcement officials, by
allowing the government to keep some sensitive or embarrassing corporate
information secret. An effective national cyber-defense network will grow
from companies' individual actions "as soon as three to five years" from
now, if nothing distracts senior managers, predicted Charles Le Grand,
director of technology practices for the Institute of Internal Auditors,
based in Altamonte Springs, Fla.

Banking and Finance Cyber-Security: B-
The 9/11 atrocity shifted banks' focus from individual self-defense against
high-tech thieves to a more ambitious communal defense against malicious
terrorists intent on destroying the banking infrastructure and the public's
faith in the financial system.

"It made us think differently about security," said Catherine Allen, chief
executive officer of BITS, or the Banking Industry Technology Secretariat,
which is the financial industry's nonprofit clearinghouse for
information-security practices and technology. "It made us realize how
interdependent we are on other industries, like telecommunications." Since
then, she said, "the industry has looked at how it can work together with
other critical industries...on a global basis." BITS is funded by major U.S.
banks, insurance companies, and securities firms, as well as by major
overseas financial companies.

This is a major shift for the finance industry, and the consequences will
emerge only slowly. For example, banks are changing their standard contracts
to require that subcontractors -- telecommunications companies and power
companies, for example -- have backup facilities and use anti-hacker
software. The banks are also automatically and anonymously sharing data
about computer-security problems with their information security and
analysis center, operated by an outside contractor. This arrangement --
which was facilitated by a provision in the 2001 USA-PATRIOT anti-terror law
-- gives banks some ability to quickly detect widespread, surreptitious
hacking.

Chemical Industry: D
The Environmental Protection Agency has identified 123 chemical plants that,
if hit by a serious explosion, could each harm at least a million people. In
addition, more than 5,000 facilities across the nation each store more than
100,000 pounds of chemicals that EPA ranks as extremely dangerous, including
chlorine, hydrochloric acid, and ammonia. A June National Research Council
report described toxic chemicals as "weapons of choice for terrorist
attacks."

But in the months since September 11, the Bush administration has not
imposed any new security measures on the companies that make, use, store, or
transport hazardous chemicals, or on the businesses that handle hazardous
waste. Instead, federal regulators have allowed the chemical industry to
develop its own safety program. Immediately following 9/11, chemical
companies temporarily stopped transporting hazardous chemicals. Since then,
many firms say they have tightened security and lowered the volume of
hazardous chemicals they store on site. In addition, the American Chemistry
Council, which represents 180 of the nation's largest chemical
manufacturers, recently adopted a plan requiring its members to boost the
security at their most vulnerable facilities by 2003.

Environmental activists argue that the industry actions do not go far enough
to protect the public from potential terrorist attacks. They charge that the
ACC's plan fails to encourage the use of safer chemicals and applies to only
a small fraction of the companies that make, use, or transport hazardous
substances.

In July, a Senate committee agreed that tougher government action is needed.
The Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously backed legislation
that would require the administration to assess the vulnerabilities of the
plants that house the most-dangerous chemicals and to push businesses to
adopt safer technologies that use lower levels of hazardous chemicals.
Proponents want to add the measure to the Homeland Security Department bill.
The American Chemistry Council, however, contends that government mandates
would actually slow down its efforts to improve security at plants that are
most susceptible to terrorist attack.

Telecommunications: C
The telecommunications industry has worked with the federal government for
decades to shield the phone networks from physical attacks, mostly by
increasing the number and geographic distribution of phone exchanges.
Redundancy paid off on 9/11, when the new cell phone networks allowed many
people to communicate in New York City despite the damage to the telephone
systems. But the new cyber-threat comes from terrorist hackers determined to
infiltrate and wreck the computers that control the nation's varied
telecommunications networks.

In the early 1990s, the companies' new computer exchanges were repeatedly
attacked by hackers for amusement. The resulting publicity, and the parallel
pressure from Pentagon officials worried about large-scale hacker attacks,
pushed industry officials to increase the security of their systems. In
2000, a joint government-industry data-sharing center was established in
Arlington, Va. Since 9/11, according to industry officials, the center has
greatly increased information-sharing about possible hacker threats among
its telecommunications companies, and with other industrial sectors, such as
the information-technology firms. This cooperation is aided by the National
Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, established in 1984. The
membership now includes top executives from telecommunications, computer,
and Internet companies.

But deregulation and the Internet's boom and bust have put these companies
under great economic pressure, reducing their capability to invest in
security. Widespread investment is required, say experts, because terrorist
hackers might be able to use small security gaps to wreck critical computer
systems that control vital services, including telecommunications networks.

Mail Safety
U.S. Postal Service: B-
Bill Lewis, president of the American Postal Workers Union local in Trenton,
N.J., doesn't hesitate when asked whether he feels safer today than during
last fall's anthrax attacks. If someone were to send an anthrax-tainted
letter through the mail today, Lewis says, "we would have some dead people."


Last fall, four letters laced with anthrax were sent from the Trenton
processing facility to New York City and Washington. Four New Jersey postal
workers survived after contracting anthrax, but two Washington colleagues
died.

In the aftermath of the attacks, the Postal Service bought for its employees
4 million facemasks that are able to filter out 95 percent of microbes in
the air and 86 million pairs of gloves. It also spent $245 million on
vacuums and filters, and it is planning to install sensors to detect
biological agents within 18 months. But these safeguards are aimed at
hand-mailed letters, not the 150 billion pieces of bulk mail processed every
year.

Thus far, Congress has appropriated more than $750 million to boost mail
safety, but the Postal Service has asked for an additional $800 million for
fiscal 2003 and $5 billion over several years to deal with new safety
concerns.

Meanwhile, the Postal Service is working to implement new safety procedures
and equipment. Eight irradiation machines that cost a total of $40 million
are being used to zap mail in Washington ZIP codes beginning with the
numbers 202, 203, 204, and 205. Postal employees are using vacuums to clean
mail-processing machines, but they still rely on air blowers for
hard-to-reach areas.

Safety seminars urge postal workers to use gloves and masks. Few do,
however, because the gear is uncomfortable, Lewis says. Individual pieces of
mail receive no additional scrutiny beyond what was done before the anthrax
attacks, he says.

The Postal Service videotapes transactions at some of its retail facilities
and is testing new technologies that may be able to detect biological agents
in the mail. In an effort to deter bombings, it has removed thousands of
mailboxes near airports, military installations, schools, and other public
facilities.

Private Package Shippers: D
Representatives of both the United Parcel Service and FedEx -- the two
largest private parcel carriers -- said they would not reveal new steps
taken to improve mail safety for fear of endangering their employees. "The
problem is that if you discuss the specifics of what you are doing, you make
those counterproductive," said UPS spokesman Bob Godlewski.

But parcel shippers and some employees say that little has been done. Last
November, for example, the FedEx Pilots Association asked company management
to take a number of actions: to test aircraft filtration systems for spores;
to create emergency response mechanisms for infected employees; to bag and
seal U.S. Postal Service mail that FedEx planes carry; to make anthrax
vaccinations available to Federal Express personnel on a voluntary basis;
and to acquire machinery to irradiate mail. In response, FedEx "basically
did nothing," said union spokesman Kevin Scheiterlein.

FedEx has trained some employees as "dangerous-goods" specialists, and it
requires that one be present at every mail-processing facility, employees
say. And FedEx says it is providing extra scrutiny for packages from
shippers unknown to the company. Regular clients receive less scrutiny, the
company says, because their packages can be easily traced.

But last fall, dozens of FedEx packages filled with white powder reached
Planned Parenthood facilities around the country, although the powder turned
out to be not hazardous. In January, FedEx delivered radioactive material
from Paris to a company in New Orleans. The 300-pound package was not
monitored for radiation, and two employees were exposed. But in May, FedEx
employees in Columbus, Ohio, discovered a package leaking white powder, and
alerted authorities.

A spokesman for the Teamsters union, which represents United Parcel Service
employees, said the union was satisfied with steps taken by UPS management,
although he declined to elaborate. In the past year, UPS has not faced any
public controversy surrounding its mailings, unlike the mixed record at
FedEx.

Last fall, UPS did begin allowing its drivers and handlers to pull any
suspicious package for examination by employees trained in handling
hazardous materials. Previously, only packages that were leaking or showed
other indications of containing hazardous materials could be pulled.



NATIONAL SECURITY
Responding To The Damage
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., Marilyn Werber Serafini, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Aug. 9, 2002

If the terrorists succeed, and attack America again, whether with airplanes
or anthrax, how good will the response of emergency workers be? The answer
is probably better than last year -- which wasn't so bad after all -- but
not yet as good as it could be, or will be. The National Guard and the
Pentagon reacted quickly and well after last year's attacks, and are
reorganizing to get better. Local first responders, from caregivers to
firefighters to police, have had their awareness and training significantly
enhanced in the past year. But the things that can only be bought with money
-- -supplies and equipment, and above all radios and other communications
devices that can link all these responders together -- are still slow in
coming.

Local Preparedness
Ever since 9/11, cities, towns, and counties across the nation have been
preparing for terrorist attacks with a new sense of deadly urgency. Now they
just need money, equipment, training, intelligence, and radios that work.

Budgets and Equipment: D+
On paper, Congress has approved hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to
firefighters, police, paramedics, and other first responders, and more money
is to come. In last year's post-9/11 supplemental budget bill, the amount
was $650 million. This year, the proposal is for $3.5 billion. But how much
of last year's amount actually made it to local governments? Outside of
Washington, New York City, and a few other top targets, the answer is,
precious little.

Consider the "Assistance to Firefighters" grant program, run by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency's U.S. Fire Administration. Congress authorized
$360 million for the program in fiscal 2002, most of that sum in the
supplemental budget bill passed after 9/11. But almost half of this money
was approved before September 11. The first grants went out to 72 fire
departments only on July 11, 2002, 10 months after the attacks. They totaled
just $3.9 million -- barely 1 percent of the total available. It will take
until December, officials estimate, to get all the 2002 grant money out the
door.

Or take the Justice Department's Office for Domestic Preparedness, which has
a pot of money set aside for each U.S. state and territory to buy new
emergency, fire, and police equipment. As of late July, 39 states and
territories had gotten their grants, totaling $97.9 million. Ten more
applications are undergoing Justice's exhaustive review. The remaining seven
states and territories do not even have their applications in. And more than
$47 million is still waiting to be disbursed -- and this is money that
Congress voted two years ago for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2001.
Even after the money is disbursed, it takes time to filter down from the
federals to the states to the locals and finally to the companies that
actually make the new equipment.

Why such delay? Even well-established programs can move slowly -- and the
initial Nunn-Lugar-Domenici bill, which set up the first "domestic
preparedness program" to aid local governments against terrorism, passed
only in 1996. Since then, local and state governments have had to create
organizations from scratch just to figure out what they need to ask for.
Federal agencies have had to invent review procedures to make sure
municipalities are spending taxpayer dollars wisely. And no one has yet
agreed on clear standards for what works. Every step makes sense -- but also
takes time.

So the cry around the country is, "Show me the money." So far, Washington's
answer is, "The check is in the mail."

Interoperable Communications: D
Of all the pieces of equipment that first responders are missing, the most
desperately important is something deceptively simple. It is not a high-tech
sensor, a protective mask, or a sophisticated rescue vehicle. What local
firefighters, police, paramedics, and other emergency responders across the
nation need, more than anything else, are radios that let them talk to one
another.

Age-old bureaucratic rivalries and the generations-long practice of drawing
up budgets separately mean that fire and police departments in the same town
often use different radios with different frequencies that cannot
communicate with each other, let alone with neighboring jurisdictions. Even
in ordinary accidents, this gap can slow response and cost lives. In a
terrorist attack, it could be disastrous.

At 10:07 a.m. on September 11, police helicopters hovering over the World
Trade Center radioed a warning that the twin towers looked as if they were
about to fall. That gave rescuers 21 minutes' warning to get out. But most
firefighters never got the message: Their radios weren't linked to the
police department's. And this was in New York, arguably the best-prepared
city in the world.

The situation nationwide has improved little since 9/11. The technology to
fix the problem does exist. The state of Maryland, for example, is
installing at its own expense computerized "repeaters" that translate
messages from one radio network to another. But with funding tight -- and no
clear national standard for what system to use -- most places are stuck with
the same old communications gear that can't communicate.

New Technologies: C-
Across most of the nation, local governments are struggling to obtain basic
equipment to protect against terrorism. But for more than a year, with
little fanfare, high-tech sensors have been quietly sniffing the air in
Washington's Metro subway system, acting like canaries in the proverbial
mineshaft. This PROTECT system was triggered by the Aum Shinrikyo cult's
1995 sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system and is an experiment
of the Washington Metro and the Energy Department's national laboratories.
(The acronym stands for Program for Response Options and Technology
Enhancement for Chemical/Biological Terrorism.) BASIS, a similar warning
system developed by the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos labs (Biological
Aerosol Sentry and Information System), was deployed during the 2002 Winter
Olympics in Salt Lake City -- and now, rumor has it, is in operation around
Washington.

All of this is great, as far as it goes -- but that isn't very far. Some of
the technologies developed by the labs are now in widespread use, such as
biochemical identification kits and a germ-killing foam, developed at Sandia
in New Mexico. The foam, for instance, was used to decontaminate Capitol
Hill offices after last fall's anthrax attacks. But the more-powerful
detection systems, which require an array of sophisticated sensors linked by
computers, remain in the prototype stage. So although these systems have
been used against a few top targets, it is as much to test them in realistic
conditions as to provide enhanced protection. For the vast majority of local
agencies around the nation, these technologies are not even on the wish
list.

Training: C-
One thing America did have on its emergency shelves on 9/11: training.
Thanks in large part to several years' worth of federal funding, educational
institutes for police, firefighters, disaster planners, and other local
officials had sizable libraries of course materials on hand for responding
to terrorist attacks, from firebombings to biological warfare. The courses
were even designed for the busy schedules of emergency workers by dividing
sessions into intensive, two-to-five-day workshops. Plenty of qualified
instructors were available. The only real limiting factor was -- once again
-- the money.

Where the dollars flowed, the results could be dramatic. Through the
National Domestic Preparedness Consortium, a Justice Department-funded
network of five training institutions each got about $3.5 million in fiscal
2001 to train local emergency workers. In the post-9/11 supplemental budget,
that total was ramped up to $15 million each. Texas A&amp;M University alone has
already taught more than 16,000 people since September 11 -- compared with
fewer than 5,000 over the same period last year -- and is aiming for 30,000
by year's end. In contrast, the budget at FEMA's National Fire Academy was
set two years in advance, leaving no room to expand courses to meet
post-9/11 demand.

But training even tens of thousands of first responders is only a down
payment on preparing what the White House estimates to be the country's more
than 1.75 million police, paramedics, and firefighters. The hope must be
that each trained person acts as an evangelist, spreading knowledge to a
dozen others.

Information-Sharing: D+
Fires, floods, and hurricanes can all be devastating, but at least they have
a historical track record subject to detailed statistical analysis, and
weather forecasters can often see them coming. Foreseeing a terrorist attack
can stump the entire $30 billion federal intelligence apparatus, not to
mention City Hall. So although the locals are eager for federal funding,
they want one thing from Washington even more: information. The problem is
that the data is not flowing any more freely than the dollars.

The bridge between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement is the
FBI, which maintains an array of computer networks to pass information to
state and local police agencies. But, said former House Judiciary staffer
and California police officer John Cohen, "the FBI has traditionally been
known as the black hole": Information went in but rarely came out. Rep. Curt
Weldon, R-Pa., a former mayor himself, said that after 9/11, the feds
ordered his hometown police department to post guards on a railway leading
past an oil refinery -- but never told them any details of the threat or
what to prepare for.

Since 9/11, "we're getting an extraordinary good-faith effort from the FBI
to provide more, and more-timely, and better information," said Jim Pasco,
national executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. But that takes
"a tremendous sea change in the culture over there. It'll take a long time."


FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III is creating federal-state-local "Joint
Terrorism Task Forces" at every bureau field office around the country. But
state and local sources say that much of the information-sharing that does
take place is ad hoc and informal, which means progress has varied widely
depending on the personalities at a given field office.

The FBI is only now creating an Office of Intelligence to systematically
take classified data, redact it, and pass on the unclassified essentials.
Today, the federal government has no comprehensive network to pass detailed
warnings -- as opposed to infuriatingly vague general alerts -- to state and
local agencies, even in law enforcement.

And outside of law enforcement, there is no network at all. The only
information local fire departments get from the feds is Homeland Security
Director Tom Ridge's infamous color-coded chart of threat levels, said John
Buckman, fire chief in Evansville, Ind., and president of the International
Association of Fire Chiefs. "Other than knowing whether it's a blue day, a
green day, or a yellow day, that's it," he said. "[Our] main source of
information on terrorists? CNN."

Awareness and Planning: B
The money may not have arrived. The equipment may still be on order. The
information hasn't yet been shared. But one crucial thing has changed since
September 11. Across the nation, every city, town, and county is thinking
about terrorism more seriously than they ever have before. September 11 "was
a tremendous wake-up call for the emergency forces of America," said John
Eversole, a retired Chicago firefighter who is now a hazardous-materials
expert. "We are more aware today." State and local officials, police and
firefighters and emergency managers, all agree that this vital intangible is
beginning to inspire tangible change.

September 11 showed every local official in the country that the terrorist
threat was real, massive, and capable of overwhelming even a city such as
New York. For the first time in living memory, the New York Fire Department
had to ask neighboring jurisdictions for help. So smaller local agencies
around the country -- which means essentially every local agency -- had to
face the fact that if New York couldn't do it alone, neither could they.

Historically, fire, police, and paramedics in a single jurisdiction have
tended to plan, budget, and operate independently. And cooperation between
neighboring localities was always a secondary concern. "Local governments
have been able to act independently of each other," said Javier Gonzales, a
county commissioner in Phoenix and an immediate past president of the
National Association of Counties. "Counties have not needed to rely on
cities, and cities have not needed to rely on counties. [Against terrorism,]
that's going to be an absolute must."

So in the aftermath of 9/11, officials have begun reaching out across the
lines of jurisdiction to start planning for the worst, together. Indeed, the
sheer tightness of budgets and the scarcity of specialized biochemical
defense equipment has forced many local departments to share resources with
their neighbors and even local businesses -- many chemical plants, for
example, have hazardous-materials teams better equipped than those of nearby
towns.

"There was a recognition that existed long before 9/11" of the need to
cooperate, said George Foresman, a homeland security adviser to the governor
of Virginia. "The challenge has been the political will.... 9/11 was the
momentum that a lot of these initiatives needed, to go from being a good
idea that might not be executable to being a great idea that must be
executed."

Health/Bioterror
After the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent anthrax
mailings, the medical community got a quick education on bioterrorism
threats such as anthrax and smallpox. With help and guidance from the Health
and Human Services Department's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
and various medical organizations, health professionals are much better
informed now about detecting both natural and bioterrorism-related outbreaks
of deadly diseases.

But awareness can help only so much if the medical community isn't prepared
to respond to an actual outbreak -- and much of what's needed is still in
the planning stages. Indeed, almost a year after September 11, federal money
to beef up communications systems, to buy protective gear, and to arrange
for patient overflow and isolation areas is just now beginning to flow to
hospitals and to state and local health departments.

Vaccine Stockpile Buildup: B
HHS has moved quickly since September 11 to build up its stockpile of
smallpox vaccines and anthrax antibiotics. By the end of this year, the
department will have stockpiled more than 270 million doses of the smallpox
vaccine, which is more than enough to vaccinate the entire U.S. population.
But the government's policy, which is still being crafted, probably will be
to vaccinate first responders and medical personnel right away, while
withholding the vaccine from the general public until there's a smallpox
outbreak. In addition, HHS will have enough of the anthrax antibiotic Cipro
stockpiled by the end of the year to treat 20 million people.

Since September 11, HHS has increased from eight to 12 the number of
so-called "push packs" that are stockpiled. This adds up to 600 tons of
emergency supplies that are strategically (and secretly) located throughout
the country for quick mobilization. Each push pack has at least 84 different
types of supplies, such as antibiotics, needles and IVs, a pill-counting
machine, and nerve-gas antidotes.

In addition, HHS's National Institutes of Health is working on a new
generation of the smallpox vaccine, which is expected within the next few
years, and a better anthrax vaccine, which is about a year and a half to two
years down the road. NIH is also trying to develop new treatments for viral
hemorrhagic fever, plague, and Rift Valley fever, as well as new anti-viral
treatments for potential bioterrorism agents such as smallpox. NIH received
almost $1 billion this year to conduct this research and is expecting
another $1 billion in fiscal 2003.

Changes at Hospitals/Emergency Rooms: C
Most hospitals have taken important steps toward creating or upgrading
emergency-response plans that designate who's in charge and what should be
done in the event of a bioterrorism attack. Many have even participated in
simulated attack exercises. But knowing what to do and having the equipment
to do it are not the same thing. New federal funds did not begin flowing to
hospitals until recently, and that's kept many planned improvements at the
talking stage.

Hospitals have used some of their own budgets to stock more antibiotics and
to buy protective gear, but much more money is needed, say hospital
executives. They are still waiting to see most of the $135 million that
Congress appropriated for state grants that will funnel money to hospitals.
Hospitals had to submit to HHS their plans for using the money, specifically
focusing on how they could guarantee sufficient sick beds, medical staff,
and equipment in times of emergency. They also outlined how they would
educate and train personnel.

As of April, 69 percent of hospitals had a bioterrorism response in their
emergency plan, according to a survey conducted by the American Hospital
Association. Most hospitals (82 percent) had established backup internal
communications. Nearly 90 percent of hospitals had reached out to other
public safety groups in the community, and 67 percent had participated in
community-wide disaster drills. In addition, 72 percent of hospitals had
trained key personnel to recognize and report symptoms of biological and
chemical agents, and 87 percent had established a process to report unusual
cases to public health authorities.

Despite advances, 78 percent of hospitals indicated that a shortage of funds
was keeping them from creating systems to track and identify unusual
admissions and prescription patterns, from requiring lab personnel to obtain
specialized training, and from establishing backup community-wide
communication capabilities.

Communications and Training: B
Back in 1999, the CDC began creating an online Health Alert Network to
quickly educate state public health officials about potential disease
outbreaks and to give states (plus several large cities) grant money to
build Internet connections so they could access the information. But the
last 13 states were added to the network just a few weeks before the
terrorist attacks, and the system wasn't truly inaugurated until after
September 11.

Before the terrorist attacks, the CDC had sent only one e-mail message over
the network. Since then, 88 messages have been sent, mostly during last
fall's anthrax cases, to keep medical professionals apprised of incidents
and to give them a quick primer on the disease. The messages can go to about
2,000 local health agencies and approximately 76 public health-related
associations, such as the American Medical Association and the American
Hospital Association, which then relay information to their members. The
network may be reaching as many as 1 million people, the CDC estimates.
Information about diseases, symptoms, and suspicious cases may flow upstream
as well.

What comes next will be the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System,
which is intended to build on the network by sending out additional money to
help local health departments get hooked up to the Internet by more than one
means, so that communications will be guaranteed even if one method of
access is disrupted during an emergency.

Public and Private Laboratories: C
During last fall's anthrax outbreak, when a surge of medical specimens
flooded laboratories around the country, staff worked overtime and created
makeshift testing space. But keeping pace with suspected anthrax specimens,
plus all of the usual testing, strained labs to their limits. Congress
responded by establishing lab benchmarks that states and cities must meet to
get a piece of the $1 billion in grant money for bioterrorism preparedness
planning. One requirement is that states create plans to improve working
relationships and communications between private clinical labs and public
health and research labs.

Back in 2000, the CDC began funding pilot projects in Michigan, Minnesota,
Nebraska, and Washington to foster working relationships between private and
public health labs in case of an emergency in which greater medical testing
capacity is needed. Since then, according to the CDC, the four states have
created specimen-transport systems, improved testing for potential
bioterrorism illnesses, assessed clinical laboratory capabilities for
infectious-disease testing, and improved laboratory practices -- such as
better detection of anti-microbial resistance. The CDC plans to expand the
program to all states, thereby creating the National Laboratory System.

States are spending some of their own money, too. At least four new public
health labs are under construction, and three more are in the design phase,
according to Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public
Health Laboratories. "New equipment is being delivered daily," he said. "In
some cases, labs have doubled the ability to process samples."

Although Becker said that labs have begun hiring new staff, he voiced
concern about a shortage of qualified professionals. Moreover, he's worried
about the ability of public health labs to test for chemical terrorism. Only
about five of the nation's public health labs (each state has at least one)
can now test for such chemical toxins in human tissue or blood samples, he
said.

The Military
The military's response to 9/11 was swift and massive, with National Guard
troops on watch across the country -- but except for a few specialized
units, a fundamental re-examination of the armed forces' role in the
homeland has hardly begun.

The National Guard: A-
The minutemen would have been proud. National Guard fighter jets were in the
air over Washington, D.C., within minutes after the Pentagon attack on
September 11. Troops were on the streets in hours. And over the months
since, an estimated 20,000 Guardsmen and -women have flown patrols or stood
watch over America's airports, bridges, borders, power plants -- and the
Capitol itself -- an operation estimated to have cost $829 million to date.
The contribution of these part-time citizen-soldiers has been visible and
undeniable.

It was also ad hoc. The sight of military jets and Humvees patrolling U.S.
cities was strikingly novel. But the forces themselves were the same old
units. Maj. Gen. Richard Alexander, executive director of the National Guard
Association of the United States, said the Guard responded "in a traditional
way to a nontraditional threat."

The National Guard is primarily funded, organized, equipped, and trained for
fighting conventional wars overseas. In the rush to respond to 9/11,
however, the Guards had to learn new skills. A combat engineer would end up
protecting an airport, or a cannon-loader would be dispatched to the Winter
Olympics, with only a few days' familiarization with the special
requirements of the new homeland role, be it running a metal detector or
working with local police. Otherwise, the troops fell back on the
general-issue skills -- patrolling a perimeter, guarding a gate, handling a
rifle -- that they learned in basic training. The Guard tackled an
unfamiliar problem, but with its traditional tool kit.

And Guard leaders are adamant about keeping that kit, instead of switching
to new tools for their new role. They want their funding and organization to
continue to be based on the requirements for operations overseas -- and they
want to continue defending the homeland with "spare" forces designed for
missions abroad. "I totally disagree," Alexander said, with reallocating the
Guard's resources to focus on securing the homeland at the expense of
supporting the regular military in wars abroad -- what Alexander called the
Guard's "primary constitutional role."

But outside the Guard leadership, there are calls for change. Both
active-duty officers and civilian experts were calling for the Guard to
focus on the homeland long before 9/11. And in late June, Senate
Governmental Affairs Chairman Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. -- a potential
presidential candidate -- delivered an entire speech around the idea that
"we need to build new and different National Guard units ... specifically
trained, equipped, and deployed" for domestic defense.

For now, the Guard is getting applause from all sides. But from a distance,
you can hear the rumblings of a stormy debate over its future role.

Civil Support Teams: A-
The National Guard has, indeed, taken on one new, permanent role in homeland
defense -- with its new "Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Teams."
Each of these is composed of 22 full-time National Guard troops -- not
part-timers like traditional Guardsmen -- and serves under a state
governor's command. Each team is specially trained and equipped to help out
local governments in case of a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack.
Although Congress authorized the teams in 1998, the first CST was certified
as ready for operations in July 2001. On the eve of 9/11, just nine teams of
a planned 32 were operational. But today, 27 teams are up and running in 26
states (California has two), and five more are getting organized.

Controversy slowed the creation of the teams. Local fire chiefs said they
would never arrive in time. Technical experts said their capabilities at
best duplicated what major cities' hazardous-materials units already had.
The Pentagon's own inspector general lambasted the CST program in January
2001. And as late as September 20 of last year, Congress's General
Accounting Office called the teams' capabilities redundant and their role
unclear.

But in the aftermath of 9/11, even New York -- probably the best-prepared
city on the planet -- found a use for its state's Civil Support Team: It
sent the Guardsmen spelunking into the twisted pile of rubble at the World
Trade Center, searching for toxic leaks that might endanger rescue workers.
On the far side of the country, California turned to its teams when civilian
technicians were deluged with false alarms of anthrax.

Straddling the lines between military and civilian, federal and state, the
Civil Support Teams could serve as a vital link between overwhelmed local
governments and an influx of military aid. So, although concerns about the
program remain, 9/11 has given it renewed momentum -- and legislation is
currently circulating in Congress to create a team in every state and
territory.

The Pentagon's New Command: A-
When homeland security became Job One on the morning of September 11,
America's armed forces were rather like heavyweight boxers suddenly thrown
into a judo match: They had plenty of strength, but their muscles were
trained and built up to fight in a different arena altogether. And to date,
the Defense Department really has not started developing new muscles --
units, equipment, personnel -- specifically for the heavy lifting they may
be called upon to do for homeland security. But the military has started to
rewire its brain, creating a new headquarters to think about new problems.

The big innovation is the new Northern Command, expected to begin operations
on October 1. For the first time in history, a single officer will control
all military operations in defense of the United States itself, on air,
land, or sea. Equally important, and equally unprecedented, the command's
headquarters will have homeland security as its top priority, not a
secondary mission. This reform is more than just a reshuffling of
responsibilities deep within the Pentagon: The change will give civilian
authorities a single, clear military partner whom they can go to for help.

The creation of "Northcom" is having spillover effects all over Defense. The
new command takes over coastal defense and "civil support" for local
governments from the Joint Forces Command, which can now concentrate on its
other mission of experimenting with future tactics and technology. And
Northcom divorces the radars and fighter jets of NORAD, the U.S.-Canadian
North American Aerospace Defense Command, from the satellites of U.S. Space
Command; the remnant of that command is being merged with Strategic Command,
which controls nuclear weapons. There are also reports of a major, albeit
unresolved, reorganization pending on the civilian side, in the Office of
the Secretary of Defense, to manage homeland defense. Setting up these new
organizational frameworks, and then fleshing them out with new forces, will
take time. But since 9/11, the military has made a real start.

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