WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- "They're asking, when will he come, when will he come? Don't worry! He's coming. He's coming." Adolf Hitler's famous line in 1940 about his planned invasion of Britain got loud applause out of his Third Reich audience but in fact he never "came" to Britain.
However the terrorists who slaughtered 3,000 Americans with hijacked airliners in New York City and the Pentagon in Virginia on Sept. 11, 2001, will certainly come again. Unfortunately, you can count on it.
Barton Gellman, the well-respected national security and defense expert of the Washington Post, published on Christmas Eve a highly alarming but all too accurate assessment of the threat that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaida terrorist organization still poses to the American people. He recorded a grim litany of ineffectiveness and incompetence on the part of the Bush administration and the federal government in the 15 months since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that --unfortunately -- echoes, confirms and extends repeated investigations by our own national security experts at UPI.
According to Gellman's investigation, almost nothing has been done to prevent nuclear weapons or nuclear materials being smuggled into the United States even though, as we have reported in UPI Analysis, promising technology potentially capable of carrying out such monitoring already exists. And the core cadres of al Qaida remain intact, unpenetrated by U.S. intelligence and capable of carrying out more attacks. Indeed, top U.S. government officials told Gellman that they believed the White House itself and probably Congress would be prime targets for future "decapitation" attacks on the leadership of the United States.
Some 14 months ago, Joshua Sinai of the Arlington-based ANSER strategic assessment group made this prescient assessment to UPI Analysis when he warned that previous plans by the terrorists and those believed to be associated with them offered important guides for where they would attack next. "They try, try and try again," he said. "A 1993 attempt to destroy the World Trade Center with a bomb planted below ground level in the Twin Towers failed. Eight years later they had far more success."
By this estimate, Sinai said, other major landmarks in New York City such as the Empire State Building and the Lincoln Tunnel, both of which have figured in the writings of arrested and convicted killers and terrorists over the past decade, could also be prime targets.
Another key indicator, other experts said, was the warning that bin Laden and his al Qaida organization issued to fellow Muslims after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, warning them not to live in high rise buildings in the United States or to take airliners. This, they said, suggested that more attempted hijackings in order to crash the planes into more huge skyscrapers to inflict maximum loss of life remained a real possibility.
U.S. counter-terrorism experts said that such attacks ought in theory to be easy to anticipate and prevent but they currently remained a very real danger.
This danger, if anything, has only been increased by the current determination of the Bush administration to push ahead with the defeat, conquest and occupation of Iraq. First, because such action is likely to inflame passions throughout the Arab and wider Muslim world and create a far more protective and sympathetic climate within which al Qaida can operate.
And second because, as Gellman also documented in his Washington Post article, the obsession with "taking out" Iraq already has drained scarce manpower and expertise within the U.S. government and intelligence community away from the hunt to locate and destroy the leaders of al Qaida. This has given the terrorist networks that remain in place a dangerous breathing space and time to plot and organize more attacks.
The administration at least has shown energy and resolve in pushing ahead with production of enough smallpox virus to inoculate the entire U.S. population. However, afflicted with its usual bureaucratic sclerosis, it continues to resist making the vaccine freely available. But given the wildfire speed with which smallpox can spread, and the fact that carriers do not show any of its deadly symptoms for at least two weeks after their infection, it appears appallingly complacent and short-sighted to continue to withhold the vaccine from general use until after an outbreak has already occurred, as is the current policy.
For, as Col. Ed Badolato of Counter-Terrorism magazine, one of the leading U.S. authorities on international terrorists and their search for weapons of mass destruction, told UPI in October 2001, there are already between 300 to 600 laboratories around the world, many of them in so-called "rogue states" that harbor or are sympathetic to international terrorists capable of accessing or increasing supplies of the smallpox virus.
Rooting out and destroying al Qaida will require a root and branch transformation of the U.S. intelligence community, which remains unchanged in structure from the bureaucratic and electronic, high tech but elephantine forms it used successfully to monitor the Soviet Union through the Cold War.
Protecting the American people at home will require radical reform of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as the CIA. Yet President George W. Bush has complacently permitted the same leaders who failed to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001 catastrophic attacks to preside over them to this day. Indeed, he inherited his director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, from his predecessor, President Bill Clinton. Neither the FBI nor the CIA will be affected by the enormous, years-long bureaucratic upheaval involved in creating the new Department of Homeland Security that Bush signed into law on Nov. 25.
Yet Bush won the midterm congressional elections on the argument that his administration could protect the American people better than the Democrats. He took a national security issue vital for the very survival of the American people and waged highly successful partisan politics with it. Now he must deliver on his promises. Gellman's report, following our previous investigations at UPI, suggests that Bush and his colleagues may not have a clue how to even begin.
