[Infowarrior] - Terrorist Triage

Wed May 7 19:56:19 UTC 2008

Terrorist Triage

Why are the presidential candidates—and so many counterterrorism  
experts—afraid to say that the Al Qaeda threat is overrated?
Christopher Dickey
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 9:32 AM ET May 6, 2008

http://www.newsweek.com/id/135654/output/print

Michael Sheehan is on a one-man mission to put terrorist threats into  
perspective, which is a place they've rarely or ever been before.  
Already you can see it's going to be a hard slog. Fighting the  
inflated menace of Osama bin Laden has become big business, generating  
hundreds of billions of dollars for government agencies and  
contractors in what one friend of mine in the Washington policy-making  
stratosphere calls "the counterterrorist-industrial complex."

But Sheehan's got the kind of credentials that ought to make us stop  
and listen. He was a U.S. Army Green Beret fighting guerrillas in  
Central America in the 1980s, he served on the National Security  
Council staff under both President George H.W. Bush and President Bill  
Clinton, and he held the post of ambassador-at-large for  
counterterrorism from 1998 to 2000.

In those days Sheehan was among that persistent, relentless and  
finally shrill chorus of voices trying to warn the Clinton  
administration that Osama bin Laden and his boys represented a  
horrific danger to the United States and its interests. Days after the  
October 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17  
American sailors, experienced analysts like Sheehan at the State  
Department and Richard A. Clarke at the White House were certain Al  
Qaeda was behind it, but there was no support for retaliation among  
the Clintonistas or, even less, the Pentagon.

Clarke later wrote vividly about Sheehan's reaction after the military  
brass begged off. "Who the s--- do they think attacked the Cole, f--- 
in' Martians?" Sheehan asked Clarke. "Does Al Qaeda have to attack the  
Pentagon to get their attention?"

We all know the answer to that question, of course. But what's  
interesting is not that Sheehan was so right, for all the good it did,  
or that President Bill Clinton and then President George W. Bush were  
so wrong not to pay attention. What's interesting is Sheehan's  
argument now that Al Qaeda just isn't the existential-twilight- 
struggle threat it's often cracked up to be. Hence the subtitle of his  
new book, "Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing  
Ourselves" (Crown, 2008).

The ideas Sheehan puts forth in a text as easy to read as a Power  
Point should be central to every security debate in the current  
presidential campaign. But given the personality politics that have  
dominated the race so far, that seems unlikely. Once again it's up to  
the public to figure these things out for itself.

"I want people to understand what the real threat is and what's a  
bunch of bull," Sheehan told me when I tracked him down a few days ago  
in one of those Middle Eastern hotel lobbies where you sip orange  
juice and lemonade at cocktail time. (He asked me not to say where,  
precisely, since the government he's now advising on policing and  
terrorism puts a high premium on discretion.)

Before September 11, said Sheehan, the United States was "asleep at  
the switch" while Al Qaeda was barreling down the track. "If you don't  
pay attention to these guys," said Sheehan, "they will kill you in big  
numbers." So bin Laden's minions hit U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998,  
they hit the Cole in 2000, and they hit New York and Washington in 2001 
—three major attacks on American targets in the space of 37 months.  
Since then, not one. And not for want of trying on their part.

What changed? The difference is purely and simply that intelligence  
agencies, law enforcement and the military have focused their  
attention on the threat, crushed the operational cells they could find— 
which were in fact the key ones plotting and executing major attacks— 
and put enormous pressure on all the rest.

"I reject the notion that Al Qaeda is waiting for 'the big one' or  
holding back an attack," Sheehan writes. "A terrorist cell capable of  
attacking doesn't sit and wait for some more opportune moment. It's  
not their style, nor is it in the best interest of their operational  
security. Delaying an attack gives law enforcement more time to detect  
a plot or penetrate the organization."

Terrorism is not about standing armies, mass movements, riots in the  
streets or even palace coups. It's about tiny groups that want to make  
a big bang. So you keep tracking cells and potential cells, and when  
you find them you destroy them. After Spanish police cornered leading  
members of the group that attacked trains in Madrid in 2004, they blew  
themselves up. The threat in Spain declined dramatically.

Indonesia is another case Sheehan and I talked about. Several high- 
profile associates of bin Laden were nailed there in the two years  
after 9/11, then sent off to secret CIA prisons for interrogation. The  
suspects are now at Guantánamo. But suicide bombings continued until  
police using forensic evidence—pieces of car bombs and pieces of the  
suicide bombers—tracked down Dr. Azahari bin Husin, "the Demolition  
Man," and the little group around him. In a November 2005 shootout the  
cops killed Dr. Azahari and crushed his cell. After that such attacks  
in Indonesia stopped.

The drive to obliterate the remaining hives of Al Qaeda training  
activity along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier and those that  
developed in some corners of Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003  
needs to continue, says Sheehan. It's especially important to keep  
wanna-be jihadists in the West from joining with more experienced  
fighters who can give them hands-on weapons and explosives training.  
When left to their own devices, as it were, most homegrown terrorists  
can't cut it. For example, on July 7, 2005, four bombers blew  
themselves up on public transport in London, killing 56 people. Two of  
those bombers had trained in Pakistan. Another cell tried to do the  
same thing two weeks later, but its members had less foreign training,  
or none. All the bombs were duds.

Sheehan's perspective is clearly influenced by the three years he  
spent, from 2003 to 2006, as deputy commissioner for counterterrorism  
at the New York City Police Department. There, working with  
Commissioner Ray Kelly and David Cohen, the former CIA operations  
chief who heads the NYPD's intelligence division, Sheehan helped build  
what's regarded as one of the most effective terrorist-fighting  
organizations in the United States. Radicals and crazies of many  
different stripes have targeted the city repeatedly over the last  
century, from alleged Reds to Black Blocs, from Puerto Rican  
nationalists and a "mad bomber" to Al Qaeda's aspiring martyrs. But  
the police have limited resources, so they've learned the art of  
terrorist triage, focusing on what's real and wasting little time and  
money on what's merely imagined.

"Even in 2003, less than two years after 9/11, I told Kelly and Cohen  
that I thought Al Qaeda was simply not very good," Sheehan writes in  
his book. Bin Laden's acolytes "were a small and determined group of  
killers, but under the withering heat of the post-9/11 environment,  
they were simply not getting it done … I said what nobody else was  
saying: we underestimated Al Qaeda's capabilities before 9/11 and  
overestimated them after. This seemed to catch both Kelly and Cohen a  
bit by surprise, and I agreed not to discuss my feelings in public.  
The likelihood for misinterpretation was much too high."

It still is. At the Global Leadership Forum co-sponsored by NEWSWEEK  
at the Royal United Services Institute in London last week, the  
experts and dignitaries didn't want to risk dissing Al Qaeda, even  
when their learned presentations came to much the same conclusions as  
Sheehan.

The British Tories' shadow security minister, Pauline Neville-Jones,  
dismissed overblown American rhetoric: "We don't use the language of  
the Global War on Terror," said the baroness. "We actively eschew it."  
The American security expert Ashton Carter agreed. "It's not a war,"  
said the former assistant secretary of defense, who is now an  
important Hillary Clinton supporter. "It's a matter of law enforcement  
and intelligence, of Homeland Security hardening the target." The  
military focus, he suggested, should be on special ops.

Sir David Omand, who used to head Britain's version of the National  
Security Agency and oversaw its entire intelligence establishment from  
the Cabinet Office earlier this decade, described terrorism as "one  
corner" of the global security threat posed by weapons proliferation  
and political instability. That in turn is only one of three major  
dangers facing the world over the next few years. The others are the  
deteriorating environment and a meltdown of the global economy.  
Putting terrorism in perspective, said Sir David, "leads naturally to  
a risk management approach, which is very different from what we've  
heard from Washington these last few years, which is to 'eliminate the  
threat'."

Yet when I asked the panelists at the forum if Al Qaeda has been  
overrated, suggesting as Sheehan does that most of its recruits are  
bunglers, all shook their heads. Nobody wants to say such a thing on  
the record, in case there's another attack tomorrow and their remarks  
get quoted back to them.

That's part of what makes Sheehan so refreshing. He knows there's a  
big risk that he'll be misinterpreted; he'll be called soft on terror  
by ass-covering bureaucrats, breathless reporters and fear-peddling  
politicians. And yet he charges ahead. He expects another attack  
sometime, somewhere. He hopes it won't be made to seem more  
apocalyptic than it is. "Don't overhype it, because that's what Al  
Qaeda wants you to do. Terrorism is about psychology." In the  
meantime, said Sheehan, finishing his fruit juice, "the relentless  
24/7 job for people like me is to find and crush those guys."

As I headed into the parking lot, watching a storm blow in off the  
desert, it occurred to me that one day in the not too distant future  
the inability of these terrorist groups to act effectively will  
discredit them and the movement they claim to represent. If they did  
succeed with a new attack and the public and media brushed it off  
after a couple of news cycles, that would discredit them still more.  
The psychological victory would be ours for a change, and not only in  
our own societies but very likely in theirs. Or, to paraphrase an old  
Army dictum, if you crush the cells, the hearts and minds will follow.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/135654