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Paper no. 1078
05. 08. 2004
by B.Raman
Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and other jihadi terrorist organisations allied to it would be a beneficiary of the loss of public credibility of the latest terrorist alert announced by the Bush Administration. The alert was initially projected as due to an imminent threat to leading US and international financial institutions in Washington DC, New York and New Jersey based on new and precise intelligence. Subsequently, it has been sought to be explained away as a possible threat before the Presidential elections of November, based on four-year-old intelligence newly stumbled upon.
2. In the so-called war against terrorism, every time the credibility of a political leadership and its intelligence agencies suffers due to exaggerated or over-dramatised claims possibly to serve partisan political purposes, it creates a feeling of skepticism and cynicism in the minds of its own public and the international community. Such skepticism and cynicism tend to weaken the seriousness of the counter-terrorism campaign and thereby benefit the terrorist organisations.
3. How did this happen? Was there a deliberate attempt to circulate intelligence of pre-9/11 vintage as new intelligence in order to re-kindle the fear-psychosis in the minds of the American public and create a nervousness about the risks of John Kerry taking over as the next President of the US at a time when Al Qaeda was still alive and kicking and appeared determined to strike again in US homeland?
4. There is so far no reason to believe that the evidence presented to the US public by Tom Ridge, Secretary in charge of Homeland Security, and other officials of the Bush Administration, had been got fabricated by them. The intelligence, which triggered off the alert, was genuine and of new acquisition by the US agencies. There is no doubt about it.
5. There is also no doubt that when the intelligence came into their hands, the political leaders and others, who participated in the dramatisation of its implications, genuinely believed that the photographs and other computer data relating to targeted offices of the iconic financial institutions had been newly-collected by Al Qaeda post-9/11 as part of its continuing effort to mount another terrorist strike in the US.
6. There was an anxiety to exploit the intelligence immediately even before it had been subjected to vigorous scrutiny. This anxiety could be attributed partly to the need to share intelligence which, if correct, could have implications for the security of the public with the American people and partly to the desire to draw a propaganda mileage out of it for the partisan political benefit of Bush in the wake of the successful Democratic Party Convention at Boston, which projected Kerry in a positive light.
7. Why the need to share even raw, unprocessed intelligence with the public? To understand this, one has to go back to the weeks preceding the Christmas of 1988. The US intelligence was in receipt of an unconfirmed report from an untested source that some West Asian terrorist elements were planning to plant an explosive device on an American aircraft carrying the Christmas holiday passengers across Europe.
8. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) disseminated the intelligence to the US airline companies. It also circulated it to all US diplomatic missions in Europe and asked them to share it with the local authorities responsible for civil aviation security. However, the traveling public was not informed that the agencies were in possession of such intelligence. Nor was cany instruction in this regard issued to the US missions.
9. However, a junior-level US diplomat in Helsinki exhibited a copy of the telex message from the State Department on the notice board of the Embassy. Some American citizens living in Finland, who happened to see it, cancelled their plans for travelling by air.
10. Shortly thereafter, a Pan Am aircraft carrying a large number of US holiday-makers was blown up in mid-air off Lockerbie. During the subsequent enquiries, people came to know about the availability of this intelligence and the failure of the State Department to share it with the travelling public. The relatives of some of the victims agitated over this issue and wanted the State Department to be held accountable for the loss of over 200 lives. They contended that if their relatives, who were killed, had known that such intelligence, reliable or unreliable, existed, they would not have travelled by air.
11. It was from then onwards that the practice of issuing travel advisories to the public and sharing with them intelligence which, if true, could endanger their lives started. Since the explosion on board the Kanishka aircraft of Air India in June 1985 off the Irish coast in which a large number of Canadian nationals were killed, the Western countries and particularly Canada and the US, had seen a steady growth of terrorism-victim activism. This refers to organised action by the relatives of the victims of terrorism to exercise pressure on the political leadership and the administration and hold them accountable for their sins of commission and omission, which made the act of terrorism possible.
12. This activism started first in Canada post-Kanishka, spread to the US post-Lockerbie and then to other Western countries thereafter. The relatives of the victims of 9/11 have been very active and but for their activism, it is doubtful whether the 9/11 Commission and the President would have accepted major changes in the way the US intelligence and counter-terrorism communities function.
13. In the light of this, one cannot find fault with officials of the Bush Administration for sharing with the public the evidence which they got from Pakistan to show that Al Qaeda had been collecting data about the targeted buildings.
14.However, they were guilty of not subjecting the evidence to a careful scrutiny before rushing to the public in unwise and unwarranted haste. Why did they do so? Apparently, for partisan political reasons. If the evidence had come into their possession long before or long after the Democratic Party Convention, it is doubtful whether they would have acted with such haste.
15. After the drama staged by Tom Ridge and others before the TV cameras on August 1,2004, they seem to have realised that all the evidence gathered by Pakistan and passed on to them was of very old pre-9/11 vintage. All that this evidence shows is that among the various targets in the US, which had figured in the plans of Al Qaeda pre-9/11, were the buildings housing the financial institutions and other economic targets such as the New York Stock Exchange.
16. This is not surprising. A perusal of the 9/11 Commission report shows that ever since the Cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda's training infrastructure in Afghanistan by the US in October,1998, a constant preoccupation of bin Laden and Al Qaeda was how to strike at the US economy in retaliation. They were collecting all kinds of intelligence about possible economic targets and how to make attacks on them seem spectacular on the TV screen.
17. Al Qaeda was not the first to do it. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) had done it in London's financial district in the 1980s.The Sikh terrorists of Punjab in India had done it at the instigation of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the early 1990s and collected detailed intelligence about the Bombay High off-shore oil infrastructure and the Madras and Mumbai Stock Exchanges. The Dawood ibrahim's gang had done it, again at the ISI's instigation, and actually tried to blow up many economic targets, including the Mumbai Stock Exchange, in March 1993.
18. It was, therefore, but natural that Al Qaeda had similarly collected detailed intelligence about various economic targets in the US before 9/11. If the eagerness to politically exploit the intelligence had not distorted the judgment of the US leaders and officials, they would have given themselves time to examine the evidence before rushing to the public with their dramatised alerts.
19. Indiscriminate sharing of intelligence with the general public could prove counter-productive and weaken counter-terrorism. Let us suppose that the intelligence was really new as the US officials claimed on August 1. What does it indicate? That Al Qaeda has still a large number of sleeper cells in US homeland which the US intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies have not been able to neutralise. Once you release the intelligence and shout about it from the roof-stop before the TV cameras, you alert all the sleeper cells and make them disperse, thereby rendering the task of unearthing and neutralising them even more difficult than it already is.
20. None of these thoughts seem to have entered the minds of the officials of the Bush Administration and dictated caution. The result: A very unprofessional way of dealing with terrorism. The US public should have genuine reasons to be concerned whether their Government would ever be able to deal effectively with terrorism if they continued to act in this manner.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com )
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