So, what to do.... ??? Warnings of the Threat, several years ago, by a non-partisan committee formed during the Clinton years, and delivered a few days after Bush took office....
Warnings of the Threat--unheeded several years
Rueful Prophets Of the Unimaginable
High-Level Studies Warned of Threat
? "Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century"
By Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 22, 2001; Page C01
In the chaos of Sept. 11, as she fled from her Pentagon office, Patti Benner
Antsen's mind kept locking on two words: "Unanticipated asymmetries."
Defense planners use such parlance to describe concepts of modern warfare,
but according to Antsen, it comes down to something quite simple: "They
would attack us in non-polite ways." We would not see the attack coming. And
it would be horribly different from anything the nation had ever witnessed.
Antsen, 45, was among those who predicted years ago that terrorist incidents
like those of Sept. 11 would eventually happen. "It all clicked. It
absolutely made perfect sense to me," recalled the civilian defense
employee, who worked one corridor away from where hijackers smashed a
jetliner into the Pentagon. "This was it."
Unanticipated asymmetries: The words were emphasized in italic for readers
of a 1997 report that Antsen helped prepare, "Transforming Defense: National
Security in the 21st Century." The study by the National Defense Panel was
one of several efforts to warn about a likely attack within our borders by
terrorists, and the need to beef up homeland security.
Fighting war symmetrically means lining up our armies against their armies,
tanks against tanks. That era, the seers said, is over.
Back then, people like Antsen were considered doomsayers, a chorus of bleak
voices prophesying a strange war to come, against an ambiguous enemy. No one
knew the hour or day, they said, but it was inevitable. It wasn't a matter
of if, but when.
"Americans will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our
homeland," warned another major report on national security. "Americans will
likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers."
In a crowded Senate hearing room yesterday, former senator Gary Hart of
Colorado quoted those sentences to great effect. "That conclusion was
delivered on Sept. 15, 1999, almost exactly two years to the day before our
prediction came true," he said.
Hart co-chaired, with former senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, a
bipartisan commission that worked more than three years, spent $10 million
and produced a three-part report called "New World Coming: American Security
in the 21st Century." That commission, initiated by then-President Clinton
and House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a rare bipartisan truce, also urged the
creation of a homeland security agency -- a sweeping sort of interior
ministry whose very name might have unsettled many Americans before Sept.
11.
Back in December 1997, the National Defense Panel report said: "Coastal and
border defense of the homeland is a challenge that again deserves serious
thought." But the idea wasn't high on anyone's to-do list. After all, the
report was looking way ahead, "to meet the challenges of 2020."
As Rudman said in an interview, "We Americans have an ability to
procrastinate until we get hit on the head by a 2-by-4."
"There were people who would say, 'Homeland security? What are you, nuts?' "
recalled Antsen. "Now the thinking has changed. Now it's an agreed-to
assumption."
"You've been voices in the wilderness, for the most part," Sen. Fred
Thompson (R-Tenn.) said at yesterday's hearing by the Senate Committee on
Governmental Affairs. "You were ahead of your time," added Sen. Joseph
Lieberman (D-Conn.), the committee's chairman.
Despite their prescience, soothsayers such as Antsen (who also worked on the
Hart-Rudman report) are not chiding, "We told you so." They're heartened
that their research provided a blueprint that could be quickly implemented.
And by most accounts, senior Bush administration officials paid serious
attention to the recommendations.
"The president put it at the top of his agenda," said Virginia Gov. James S.
Gilmore, who chaired an advisory panel established in 1999 to assess
preparedness in the event of a terrorist attack involving weapons of mass
destruction. "This president acted within days after his inauguration to
begin to go to work on the issue and to coordinate with us."
Gilmore's report included this now eerie statement: "We have been fortunate
as a nation." It added, "We are impelled by the stark realization that a
terrorist attack on some level inside our borders is inevitable and the
United States must be ready."
But none of the recent major studies on terrorist threats specifically
envisioned an attack by hijackers who would turn jetliners into bombs. "We
concluded that the real weapon is not the device or the material involved,
but the terrorist delivery capacity and capability," Gilmore noted in his
testimony at yesterday's hearing. "Unfortunately, I am afraid that this
point has been borne out by the events of Sept. 11."
The governor added in an interview, "It's not been the goal of our
commission to try to dream up every possible conventional attack possible.
We understand that they are limited only by the imagination of the evil
mind, so it's purposeless, really, to try to analyze those things."
Though he wasn't at the hearing yesterday, Gingrich was hailed by Rudman as
the "father" of the homeland security concept. Later, the former Republican
congressman spoke modestly about his contributions. "Maybe the uncle," said
Gingrich, giving credit to Clinton, too.
"I wouldn't say we were prescient. I would say this [Sept. 11] event is not
the event we warned about, this event is the harbinger . . . ."
One morning in October 1998, Antsen and another staffer were briefing
Gingrich on asymmetric theories when he urged them to read screenplays and
spy novels to get ideas about what terrorists were capable of doing. Get
creative, he said, since our enemies will certainly be. As Antsen noted,
"The most important thing about an asymmetric attack is that you cannot
identify it ahead of time."
It is designed to be unthinkable, unimaginable.
But on Sept. 11, there were those who could comprehend what had happened.
That morning, Warren Rudman was heading to his Washington law office by cab,
listening to National Public Radio reports. "I thought, 'Oh God, we
predicted this.' I'm so sorry were were right. I felt awful. I take no
satisfaction in our prediction."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
