How (Not) To Catch A Terrorist
August 2, 2004
Imagine that there are "sleeper cell" terrorists burrowed deep inside America -- all of Tom Ridge's dire warnings come true. Through e-mail, cell phone and fax, they have selected key targets. A week before your attack date, a key Al Qaeda operative is captured in Pakistan. Of course any intelligence from the Pakistanis is suspect, as they need to provide a constant stream of goodies to stay within the good graces of the White House. But presuming the sources are unadulterated, the latest capture has yielded a mother-lode of information, including a computer with detailed attack plans.
Following the pattern of classic police procedures, you would expect FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security to set up a sting to capture the "sleeper cells", if they do exist. Instead, in a surreal montage, first Tom Ridge, then Mayor Bloomberg went on air for a full-dress press conference explaining which targets Al Qaeda was planning to attack. On Monday morning, I woke up to a city in full Orange Alert mode, with helicopters circling my Brooklyn neighborhood, and dire warnings on television. Once again, Ryder trucks were being searched on Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. The frenzy was capped by the New York 1 reporter telling breathless audiences that there were almost as many TV cameras on Wall Street as there were police officers. As I turned off my television, I wondered what terrorist in his right mind would now seek to ram a truck into Wall Street, after watching all of law enforcements plans laid bare on the TV screen. Or did Tom Ridge think terrorists didn't watch TV, and it was fine to broadcast all terror preparedness out loud?
Walking to the subway, I noticed many people reading the free METRO newspaper. Picking it up, I realized there was a list of potential targets in the paper, including Citigroup, and Prudential. A few minutes after I reached my morning meeting, my cell phone rang. It was an international call from a BBC Radio show in London where I was a frequent guest. They were doing a show on the Terror Alert in New York and wanted me to comment on the "feeling on the streets." "Tell me," asked the show's host, "how are people coping?" Coping? Most people seemed to be going about their business, blasý about all the warnings. Like the case of the boy who cried wolf, are people getting numb to terror alerts?
The issue continued to bother me all day. Why is Homeland Security broadcasting all their plans, instead of working covertly and quietly to capture terrorists? There are two possible and overlapping explanations. First, this is classic cover-my-ass syndrome. Since the massive intelligence failure that led to 9/11, all agencies have been scrambling to escape any fallout. Repeated terror alerts allow everyone to be covered -- should anything actually happen, we'll hear the chorus of "We Told You So."
Second, there is a belief that ordinary citizens will be able to "spot" terrorists and alert the authorities. But other than scrutinizing any brown person on the trains, what else is an ordinary citizen really equipped to do? The recent hoopla by Annie Jacobsen on the Northwest flight with Syrian musicians shows the average person's mediocre ability to spot suspicious behavior.
On the same day as the Orange Terror Alert, President Bush endorsed the idea of a single Intelligence Czar. This left me even more puzzled. Isn't that Tom Ridge's job, and if not, what is the difference? In spite of increasing surveillance power, the sum results of the last three years seem close to nil. The Special Registration Program to register Muslim men ran for a year and then finally shut down amidst protests. CAPPS and other programs for color-coding airline passengers were similarly shuttered after privacy advocates cried foul. How long before the effectiveness of the Terror Alert system is also questioned? Meanwhile, really common sense steps (like eliminating trash cans from airports, as has happened in some European airports) are neglected in favor of adrenalin pumping exercises that alarm citizens but capture no one.
We are still in the era of, as the 9/11 commission called it, "failure of imagination." All anti-terror activity is focused on following past tactics, while terrorists will surely come up with new methods. Does anyone really believe that shoe-bombs will be tried again? To fight terrorism requires law enforcement doing their job quietly and without fanfare. It does not require constant terror alerts, or new powers to arrest people without due process.
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