OUT OF THE BLUE
The Fog of War Blankets the Home Front
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and ERIC LICHTBLAU New York Times
THE prophets of doom should be breathing a sigh of relief these days. Iran and Libya, two rogue states judged to have been secretly reaching for atom bombs, have suddenly declared their intention to go peaceful and are letting international inspectors crawl all over them.
Time to celebrate? No way. Instead, some keepers of the nation's nuclear arsenal worry that maybe, just maybe, the Iranians and Libyans believe that terrorists could have a nuclear device made of plutonium and wanted to bare their clandestine uranium labors to rule out the possibility of retaliatory strikes in the event of an attack on the United States.
"Why would he be that close and give it up?" a senior weapons official said of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. "Maybe he knows something is afoot. Maybe it's the same with the Iranians."
Such is the paranoid world of homeland insecurity, where every push for protection seems to generate an equal and opposite case of the jitters. By some measures, we should all feel much safer: Saddam Hussein is locked up, Al Qaeda no longer runs Afghanistan, and the Bush administration is spending $41 billion this fiscal year to fight terrorism and tighten the nation's security.
Still, when the lights went out in the Northeast and Midwest last August during the largest power failure in American history, the first thing many people assumed was that terrorists had struck. The problem, analysts say, is a growing sense of resignation to the idea that open societies will always be vulnerable to terrorism, no matter what politicians may promise.
"I understand," Roanna Glynn, a Los Angeles schoolteacher, said after her Air France flight to Paris was canceled last week because of hijacking fears. "It's not the same kind of world it once was. I think everybody understands that."
But that kind of fatalism has Democrats fighting mad. The administration, they claim, made a strategic error in striking at Iraq instead of the roots of terrorism, and when it snubbed allies instead of working with them to track down Osama bin Laden. Everyone in the nation deserves to feel safer, they argue, much safer.
The White House begs to differ. One of Mr. Bush's great accomplishments, it maintains, is his record of battling terrorism abroad and protecting Americans at home, most recently by capturing Mr. Hussein and by negotiating Libya's pledge to dismantle its unconventional arms. It also cites a wide range of domestic protections, as well as prospective ones like antimissile technology for airliners.
Yet despite the safeguards, the menace seems to grow. Last week, federal officials warned that terrorists were planning holiday strikes that could match or exceed those of Sept. 11, 2001, and that Al Qaeda continued to eye aircraft as weapons. Air France decided on Christmas Eve to cancel six flights between Paris and Los Angeles, after American intelligence officials received reports that a handful of Islamic extremists might try to board at least one of the flights.
Beyond the fog of politics, where do things really stand? Are we in fact safer? Analysts say there are few objective measures and much room for such unquantifiables as dread. "Maybe you lie awake at night," said Humphrey Taylor, chairman of The Harris Poll. "On the other hand, if you canceled a travel plan, that's a clear change in behavior" wrought by terrorism fears, and easier to track.
Despite the subjective nature of security, travelers can see many new protections at work. Government-trained screeners now control airport security instead of private employees. Million-dollar luggage scanners check bags. Undercover air marshals fly routinely, on the lookout for suspicious activity. Investigators give much closer scrutiny to airport personnel both at home and abroad. And military planes roam the skies above New York City, Washington and other potential targets.
Invisibly, in more than 30 cities, sensors sniff the air to detect various deadly germ threats. But critics say it is overkill, with little thought given to realism. "They're wasting money on things that can't exist as aerosols," a top federal biologist said. "Let's put out detectors that are useful or not put them out at all."
Ambitious efforts by the administration to offer protection against biological weapons have fallen short on two fronts. In June, the government said its program to vaccinate up to 500,000 civilian health workers against smallpox had ground to a virtual halt after adverse side effects discouraged people from volunteering for it. Last week, the Defense Department said it was halting its anthrax vaccination program for military personnel in reaction to a court ruling that service members could not be forced to take the vaccine.
And don't forget: no arrests have been made in the series of anthrax attacks after Sept. 11, which killed five people and sickened more than a dozen others.
Critics charge that federal agencies continue to overlook important areas like ports and air cargo systems. Representative Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and a member of the House select committee on homeland security, said last week that the administration's failure to order the physical screening of all air cargo placed on passenger planes, as is now done with luggage, was reckless and inexplicable.
"Americans who travel with their wrapped gifts are forced to open their packages for inspection, but possible terrorists could ship a bomb in a cargo hold because there is no screening of those boxes," Mr. Markey said. Administration officials said they planned to phase in screening of all cargo on passenger planes, adding that they do not yet have the ability to do so.
Critics also say federal agencies have failed to coordinate their watch lists, which pinpoint suspicious individuals. Various agencies have a dozen different lists in place, with centralization only now under way after repeated prodding by Congress. And efforts to get more Arabic and Farsi speakers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and intelligence agencies have fallen far short of expectations, analysts said. Attempts to trace terrorist financing, a crucial part of the anti-terror campaign, have run into obstacles, with seizures slowing markedly.
Generally, though, experts agree that intelligence has advanced far beyond where it was a couple of years ago in terms of predicting and detecting terrorist threats.
The Air France episode offers a vivid example of the best and, potentially, the worst of the new system. With everyone on high alert, the United States was able to move quickly to analyze intelligence, step up security at places like Los Angeles International Airport and coordinate with officials in France. But was it an overreaction? A possibility exists that the intelligence, driven in part by fragmented watch lists, was poor.
What is clear is that the United States is intent on avoiding the mistakes that were made before 9/11, when many clues were overlooked.
Eager to distinguish themselves from Mr. Bush, the Democratic presidential candidates have called for more spending on domestic security, and the redoubling of aid to police and fire departments, airports, seaports, rescue squads, dams, bridges, chemical plants, hospitals and so on.
Last week, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina zeroed in on the nuclear threat. If elected, he said, he would triple spending on securing the former Soviet Union's nuclear stockpile, appoint a nonproliferation czar and convene a global summit on fighting the bomb's spread.
The Bush administration maintains that the Democrats are exaggerating the threats, and the needed responses.
In general, said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, "Americans should rest assured that while we are at this heightened threat level, we have passed credible threat information on to those who need it to do their jobs."
"I don't know that we'll ever get to the point" of being completely satisfied with the nation's ability to protect itself from terrorist attacks, he added. "But I do know that we're getting safer and more prepared every day."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |
