9-11 commission is looking backwards

[Mediocrates]

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/4923.html

Amitai Etzioni: What Will We Say Years from Now When We Wake Up and 300,000 People Have Been Killed in a Nuclear Suitcase Terrorist Attack?


Amitai Etzioni, professor of sociology at George Washington University, in the LAT (April 26, 2004):

Fast-forward three years. A bipartisan commission is conducting hearings in Washington to determine why we were asleep at the wheel when terrorists set off a nuclear device in one of our major cities. The attack killed 300,000. It shook the nation's confidence so profoundly that the Constitution was "temporarily" suspended; all civil liberties were waived to prevent future attacks.

The new commission has established that one of the reasons we failed to prevent this tragedy was the impact of an earlier commission and an earlier set of hearings: the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a.k.a. the 9/11 commission.

The problem was that the 9/11 investigation spent too much time assigning blame and looking backward. When it came to recommending safeguards for the future, it encouraged the public, federal agencies and the White House to plan for the kinds of attacks we had faced in the past rather than foreseeing dangers to come. It unwittingly contributed to a malaise that military historians have long studied: fighting the last war rather than preparing for the next one.

Could a mere congressional commission really have such a long-reaching effect? Indeed. A similar set of hearings spelled the end of the McCarthy era. Another drove Richard Nixon out of office and led to campaign finance reform. And the Church Commission, which found that the FBI improperly spied on domestic dissenters during the 1960s, strengthened the wall between the FBI and the CIA -- the same wall that is now under attack for its role in our 9/11 failures.

Consider the buzz emerging from the 9/11 commission now. In reaction to our intelligence miscues, it's pushing public opinion toward approving something like an American MI5, a domestic spying agency similar to Britain's. By highlighting Bush's inattention to terrorism before Sept. 11, it is no doubt abetting an administration desire to recoup politically by dispatching Osama Bin Laden before the elections. These actions might have merit, but they don't block the gravest of the foreseeable dangers posed by terrorism -- nuclear weapons.

In much the same way, our current anti-terrorist strategies also miss the point. Because airplanes were the previous weapon of choice, we've earmarked $5.17 billion in 2005 (out of $5.3 billion budgeted for the Transportation Security Administration) for airports. Now that trains have been attacked in Madrid, we are moving to better protect the rails. But we seem to ignore that Al Qaeda rarely attacks twice in the same way or in the same place.

We're also spending billions trying to eliminate terrorists -- in Afghanistan, in the Philippines and Indonesia, in Colombia and in Europe -- before they can hit us. This could be effective, but it is also exceedingly difficult. Terrorists are mobile, hidden and often protected by local populations. And there seems to be an unending supply of fresh recruits for every cell we take out....

As for preventing terrorists from getting their hands on nuclear weapons, it's a strategy that by comparison gets little attention and few resources. Approximately $1 billion is set aside for the purpose, just one-fifth of what we're spending to find shoe bombs, box cutters and nail clippers at airports. (Eliminating chemical and biological weapons is also important but less so, because those agents are much more difficult to weaponize and employ than nuclear material.)

Yet the nuclear threat can be met. The number of nuclear devices floating around on the black market is limited. The number of sites where they are poorly protected is small and well known. The list of experts who might illicitly develop nuclear weapons is relatively short.

The 9/11 commission, which is charged not just with investigating the past but preparing us for the future, should fix this strategic imbalance. It should recommend a substantial budget increase for the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which provides for the supervised destruction of nuclear weapons, the removal of "loose" plutonium from global circulation, and alternative training and employment of nuclear weapons scientists.
******

[Mediocrates]

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/4922.html



Richard Rorty: Our Liberties Are at Risk If We Succumb to Another Major Attack


Richard Rorty, who teaches philosophy at Stanford, in the London Review of Books (April 2004):

Europe is coming to grips with the fact that al-Qaeda's opponent is the West, not just America. The interior ministers of the EU nations have been holding meetings to co-ordinate anti-terrorist measures. The outcome of these meetings is likely to determine how many of their civil liberties Europeans will have to sacrifice.

We can be grateful that the recent terrorist attack in Madrid involved only conventional explosives. Within a year or two, suitcase-sized nuclear weapons may be commercially available. Eager customers will include not only rich playboys like Osama bin Laden but the leaders of various irredentist movements that have metamorphosed into well-financed criminal gangs. Once such weapons are used in Europe, whatever measures the interior ministers have previously agreed to propose will seem inadequate. They will hold another meeting, at which they will agree on more draconian measures.

If terrorists do get their hands on nuclear weapons, the most momentous result will not be the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It will be the fact that all the democracies will have to place themselves on a permanent war footing.

The measures their governments will consider it necessary to impose are likely to bring about the end of many of the socio-political institutions that emerged in Europe and North America in the past two centuries. They may return the West to something like feudalism.

The actions of the Bush Administration since September 11 have caused many Americans to think of the war on terrorism as potentially more dangerous than terrorism itself, even if it entailed nuclear explosions in many Western cities. If the direct effects of terrorism were all we had to worry about, their thinking goes, there would be no reason to fear that democratic institutions would not survive. After all, equivalent amounts of death and destruction caused by natural disasters would not threaten those institutions. If there were a sudden shift of tectonic plates that caused skyscrapers to collapse all around the Pacific Rim, hundreds of thousands of people would die within minutes. But the emergency powers claimed by governments would be temporary and local.

Yet if much less severe damage occurred as a result of terrorism, the officials charged with national security, those who bear the responsibility for preventing further attacks, will probably think it necessary to end the rule of law, as well as the responsiveness of governments to public opinion. Politicians and bureaucrats will strive to outdo one another in proposing outrageous measures. The rage felt when immense suffering is caused by human agency rather than by forces of nature will probably lead the public to accept these measures.

The result would not be a fascist putsch, but rather a cascade of government actions that would, in the course of a few years, bring about a fundamental change in the conditions of social life in the West.

The courts would be brushed aside, and the judiciary would lose its independence. Regional military commanders would be given the kind of authority that once belonged to locally elected officials. The media would be coerced into leaving protests against government decisions unreported.

Fear of such developments is, of course, more common among Americans like me than among Europeans. For it is only in the US that the Government has proclaimed a permanent state of war, and had that claim taken seriously by the citizens. Christopher Hitchens has jeeringly said that many American leftists are more afraid of Attorney-General John Ashcroft than they are of Osama bin Laden. I am exactly the sort of person Hitchens has in mind. Ever since the White House rammed the USA Patriot Act through Congress, I have spent more time worrying about what my Government will do than about what the terrorists will do.

The Patriot Act was a very complex omnium gatherum, hundreds of pages long. Like its British analogue, the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, it was rushed through after September 11. Both pieces of legislation were probably drawn up simply by asking the security agencies to list the restrictions they found most inconvenient. We shall soon learn whether the Madrid bombings trigger the same sort of reaction by all or most of the governments of the EU.

I don't think the Bush Administration is filled with power-hungry crypto-fascists. Neither are the German or Spanish or British governments. But I do think the end of the rule of law could come about almost inadvertently through the sheer momentum of the institutional changes that are likely to be made in the name of the war on terrorism.

If there were a dozen successful terrorist attacks on European capitals, and if some of them used nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, the military and the national security bureaucracies in all the European countries would, almost inevitably, be granted powers that they had not previously wielded.

The public would find this fitting and proper. Local police forces would probably start working on instructions from the national capital. Any criticism by the media would be seen by the government as a source of aid and comfort to terrorism. European ministers of justice would echo Ashcroft's reply to critics of the Patriot Act. "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty," Ashcroft said, "my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve."...

In a worst-case scenario, historians will someday have to explain why the golden age of Western democracy lasted only about 200 years. The saddest pages in their books are likely to be those in which they describe how the citizens of the democracies, by their craven acquiescence in government secrecy, helped bring the disaster on themselves.




Posted by Editor on Thursday, April 29, 2004 at 8:23 PM