[ALBSA-Info] Security Watch Special:US Terror Attacks

[Xhuliana Agolli]

SECURITY WATCH SPECIAL: US TERROR ATTACKS

-US reels under terrorist attacks
-Attack result of massive intelligence failure
-Bin Laden emerges as prime suspect

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US REELS UNDER TERRORIST ATTACKS

By Christopher Findlay 
ISN Staff

The US is reeling from a series of terrorist attacks that 
took place on Tuesday and that are likely to have far-
reaching consequences for global security for some time and 
are already being compared to America's most traumatic 
events like the attack on Pearl Harbor and the 
assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

The twin towers of the 110-story World Trade Center 
collapsed on Tuesday morning after two consecutive kamikaze-
style attacks with jet airliners carrying civilian 
passengers. The number of victims buried under the rubble 
is likely to be in the thousands. Almost simultaneously, 
another airliner crashed into the Pentagon building.

So far, no group has credibly claimed responsibility for 
the attacks, and US officials have refrained from pointing 
the finger, while intimating that there are strong 
suspicions towards the Al-Qa'ida group of Osama bin Laden. 
US government officials later said that names of suspected 
terrorists with possible ties to bin Laden's organization 
had been on the passenger rosters of the hijacked planes, 
according to Reuters. 

The US is currently on near-war footing (delta alert); all 
armed forces are on maximum alert short of full war 
posture. National emergency plans are being implemented and 
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is working 
with the FBI's Strategic Operation Information Center 
(SOIC), according to a FEMA press release. The Department 
of Justice has immediate responsibility for crisis 
management. The US has also closed its borders with Canada 
and Mexico to ground traffic and air traffic. 
 
In the chaos that has followed the attacks, emerging 
reports have to be critically assessed. US officials are 
reluctant to disclose their next steps, and it is therefore 
difficult to predict which direction the events will take. 
On Tuesday a high-ranking spokesman for the US armed forces 
would emphatically not rule out the possibility of 
retaliation. It will be difficult for the Bush 
administration to find an appropriate response to what is 
rapidly being perceived as, and openly labeled, a 
declaration of war, not only because the attackers are as 
yet unknown, but also because it will be difficult to 
retaliate in any meaningful way. Should a country or 
government be blamed for the attacks, the US could only 
achieve tit-for-tat retaliation as practiced by the Israeli 
security forces by a heavy military strike against an urban 
area. This would probably lose the US some of the 
sympathies and solidarity it enjoys in the current 
situation.

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/infoservice/index.cfm?service=cwn&parent=special#
US reels under terrorist attacks



ATTACK RESULT OF MASSIVE INTELLIGENCE FAILURE

By Andrew Tait
ISN Staff

The lethal terrorist attacks that devastated downtown New 
York and hit the nerve center of the US military in the 
Pentagon have been described as a monumental failure of US 
intelligence services, unparalleled since the 1941 Japanese 
bombing of Pearl Harbor.

As with Pearl Harbor, many are questioning how the world's 
largest intelligence gathering organization, with a budget 
of billions of dollars, could not have known anything about 
what was about to happen. BBC defense correspondent 
Jonathan Marcus said the attacks represented a major 
setback for the US intelligence services. "The fact that 
four separate terrorist teams seem to have been involved, 
each hijacking one airliner, suggests a level of 
organization that should not have gone unnoticed by the 
intelligence services." 

Senator Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee 
on Intelligence, called for immediate increases in the 
intelligence budget for new agents, increased eavesdropping 
capabilities, better ways to analyze materials collected by 
intelligence officers, and advanced technology. Though the 
exact figure is classified, the overall US intelligence 
budget for the 2002 financial year is estimated at US$30 
billion. 

Jane's Defense Weekly Editor Clifford Beal said the subject of
"asymmetric warfare" - the use of terrorist methods to 
strike at weaknesses in Western countries - has been a 
significant worry for strategic planners in the US for most 
of the 1990s. Beal said the failure of US intelligence could 
be a result of funding high-tech intelligence gathering 
systems to the detriment of human intelligence (HUMINT) capabilities.
"Areas such as analysis, linguist skills, 
cultivation of agent networks, and 'tradecraft' were all of 
paramount importance during the Cold War, particularly 
before the advent of space-based intelligence assets, but 
have suffered a lack of resources of late," he said. 

If the US increases its human intelligence capability, 
Israel is likely to be a major winner, Friedman said. 
Besides the fact that US sympathy for Israel will increase 
as a result of the US having experienced suicide bombings 
at first hand, Israel's intelligence infrastructure, 
particularly in the Middle East, will make Israel a vital 
partner for the US: "The United States is obviously going 
to launch a massive covert and overt war against the 
international radical Islamic movement that is assumed to 
be behind this attack," Friedman said. "Not only does this 
align US and Israeli interests, but it also makes the 
United States dependent on the Israelis - whose 
intelligence capabilities in this area, as well as covert 
operational capabilities, are clearly going to be needed," 
he said.

Yesterday's terrorist attack is also certain to strengthen 
US resolve to increase military spending. "If spending more 
money on intelligence means dipping into money that would 
otherwise pay down the national debt or dip into the Social 
Security trust fund, so be it," senior Republican senator 
Orrin Hatch said. "It's always easier to spend money 
domestically than on national security matters," Hatch 
said. "We've been neglecting our military. We've been not 
putting the monies in that should be there." (Janes, BBC, 
The Atlantic, Stratfor, SNHS)



http://www.isn.ethz.ch/infoservice/index.cfm?service=cwn&parent=special3




BIN LADEN EMERGES AS PRIME SUSPECT

By Andrew Tait
ISN Staff

As US emergency services struggled to cope with the 
devastation of Tuesday's coordinated attacks on the World 
Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FBI launched a massive 
campaign to try to identify the perpetrators. "These 
heinous acts of violence are an assault on the security 
of our nation," Attorney General John Ashcroft declared, 
as thousands of federal investigators fanned out across 
the country pursuing leads.  

While anonymous callers have claimed responsibility for a 
Palestinian radical group, the Democratic Front for the 
Liberation of Palestine and for Kashmiri separatists the 
Lashkar-e-Taiba, both of these organizations have denied 
involvement, and multi-millionaire terrorist Osama bin 
Laden has emerged as the prime suspect. Bin Laden is a 
Saudi dissident US investigators blame for 1998 car 
bombings that killed 224 people at the US embassies in 
Kenya and Tanzania and for last year's bomb attack on the 
USS Cole at a harbor in Yemen that killed 17 US sailors.  

In a surprising reversal of their long standing protection 
of bin Laden, a leading spokesman for Afghanistan's ruling 
Taliban militia has said it would consider extraditing him 
based on US evidence. US officials have described the 
Saudi-born dissident as their chief suspect in off-the-
record briefings, saying they have intercepted messages 
between his people talking about the attacks. The Taliban 
ambassador to neighboring Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, said, 
when asked about bin Laden's possible extradition, that the 
first step would be to discuss any US evidence. It would be 
"premature" to talk about extraditing the Saudi dissident. 
"If any evidence is presented to us, we will study it," he 
told reporters. "About his handover, we can talk about that 
in the second phase." Protecting bin Laden has been a matter 
of honor for the Taliban, and observers say the reversal is 
an attempt to save Afghanistan from bearing the brunt of US 
fury. Bin Laden has denied involvement in the attacks on 
the US but says he fully supports such "daring acts": "I 
support the attacks because they constitute a reaction of 
the oppressed people against the atrocities of the cruel." 

Bin Laden has repeatedly denounced the US for sending 
troops to Arab countries and for its support of Israel 
but has denied involvement in Tuesday's attack. The FBI 
is using intelligence intercepts, last-minute cell phone 
calls from jet crash victims, and search warrants to tie 
evidence from the attacks to bin Laden, who is in hiding 
in Afghanistan.  

Federal investigators believe they know the names of the 
four pilots who commandeered two airliners out of Boston 
Tuesday and steered them into the twin towers of the 
World Trade Center in New York, sources told CNN on
Wednesday. Plane tickets for seven people suspected of 
being the hijackers were purchased with one credit card, 
information federal investigators deem extremely critical 
evidence. The credit card apparently belonged to a 
person arrested in Boston, not one of the hijackers. 

Authorities in Massachusetts have identified five Arab 
men as suspects in Tuesday's attack on New York City and 
have seized a rental car containing Arabic-language 
flight training manuals at Logan International Airport, 
according to the Boston Herald newspaper. Two of the men 
were brothers whose passports were traced to the United 
Arab Emirates, the Herald reported. One of the men was a 
trained pilot. 

Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan 
said: "We want to tell the American people that 
Afghanistan feels their pain."  But according to Grigory 
Bondarevsky, an Afghanistan expert who advised the 
Russian military in the 1980s, in the past month bin 
Laden was appointed "inspector general" of the Taliban 
militia. Bin Laden was once a revered member of 
Afghanistan's Islamic mujahideen resistance against the 
Soviets in the 1980s - trained by the CIA, and so 
effective as a recruiter that close comrades at the time 
actually thought he was working for the CIA.  

Bin Laden's organisation, Al-Qa'ida (the Base), is a 
militant organization whose goal is to unite Islamic 
terrorist organizations and eliminate Western influence 
from the Islamic world. Al-Qa'ida is an umbrella 
organization with an operational reach that stretches 
around the globe. It has been extremely successful at 
maintaining a high level of security and secrecy. Despite 
the efforts of several world powers, bin Laden's 
organization has continued to support or facilitate acts 
of international terrorism. No nation has successfully 
penetrated the organization.  (Reuters, AP, BBC, Boston 
Herald, CSMonitor, MSNBC)

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/infoservice/index.cfm?service=cwn&parent=special2

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