Saturday, September 12, 1998

There’s no
immunity from
terror

Tourist traffic leaves
Honolulu vulnerable to
international terrorism

By Richard Halloran
Special to the Star-Bulletin

The customs official stood before several hundred law enforcement officers in a conference in Honolulu last week and said matter-of-factly, "Over 400 million people come into the U.S. every year, including returning American citizens, and there are 800,000 aircraft arrivals. If someone wants to bring in a vial of anthrax (a lethal bacteria), they're probably going to get in."

Moreover, nine million large cargo containers arrive by ship from abroad every year. The customs official, who cannot be named under conference rules, continued, "We can inspect only 2 or 3 percent of them for possible terrorist weapons. Altogether, we can't find the proverbial needle in the haystack."

The main conclusion from the conference: The United States, despite its multiple law enforcement agencies and powerful military forces, is mighty vulnerable to terrorist attack. "The danger could come from anywhere," said Steven S. Alm, the U.S. attorney in Honolulu and a host of the conference. "The focus of an attack could be anyplace."

That danger may have increased as a consequence of the recent cruise missile assault on alleged terrorist centers in Afghanistan and Sudan ordered by President Clinton in retaliation for the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The State Department has warned of "the potential for retaliatory acts against Americans and American interests."

Noting that terrorists "have not distinguished between military and civilian targets," the State Department said, "we take these threats seriously."

On a wider range, the FBI director Louis Freeh told a Senate committee, "The trend toward more large-scale incidents designed for maximum destruction, terror and media impact actually places an increasing proportion of our population at risk."

Pointing to biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, Freeh said, "These weapons of mass destruction represent perhaps the most serious potential threat facing the United States today."

Until last year, international terror had been on a decline because of better defenses, more international action, and improved law enforcement. The number of incidents fell to a 25-year low in 1996, then rose a bit to 304 episodes in 1997.

Some observers even scoffed at the threat. David Kopel of the Cato Institute, a research organization in Washington, said two years ago that only 200 Americans a year had been killed by terror, less than the 317 who fell off ladders, and far less than the 42,000 killed in automobile accidents.

That, however, overlooked a fundamental difference: People fall off ladders by accident but innocents are deliberately slaughtered by terrorists for political ends. Not to be underestimated are the stunning effect of a terrorist explosion, as in Oklahoma City, the trauma caused by the capricious temper of terrorism, as at the Olympics in Atlanta and the concentration of casualties, as in the airliner downed by a bomb over Scotland, all magnified by televised pictures on the six o'clock news.

When soldiers go into battle, some know they will die. When a young mother takes her child with her to the post office, her husband does not expect them to be killed by a bomb sitting in the mail.

Kopel's argument, however, does point up the dilemma of a free society in trying to cope with terror. On one hand, Americans cherish the freedom to enter public buildings or pass easily through airports for which they pay taxes. On the other hand, they expect to be protected by policemen and soldiersalso hired by tax money -- who might seek to curtail those freedoms in the name of security. No one has yet figured out how to balance those two legitimate demands.

A fresh assessment of the new terrorist threats from the National Defense University in Washington says the U.S. and other developed nations have become more vulnerable because "econ-omies and infrastructures are increasingly integrated and people move more or less freely across borders." Rogue states such as the seven designated by the State Department -- Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria -- find terror tempting "because they are not able to confront the United States more directly," said the NDU study.

It adds, however, "Rogues need not be governments; they can be radical movements" that turn to terror "to blackmail governments and gain publicity." The FBI identified some as formal terrorist groups, such as Hizballah in Lebanon, Al-Gama Al-Islamiyya in Egypt, the Palestinian HAMAS, and the Irish Republican Army.

Beyond them are what the FBI terms "loosely affiliated international radical extremists" that are "neither surrogates of, nor strongly influenced by, any one nation." According to an FBI report, "they have the ability to tap into a variety of official and private resource bases in order to facilitate terrorists acts against U.S. interests." Evidently one private resource was Osama bin Ladin, the Saudi financier fingered by the U.S. as having paid for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Although the recent attacks were against embassies, terrorist targets have changed as governments and military forces have sought to protect themselves. "In the 1990s," says the NDU survey, "most international terrorist incidents have targeted businesses rather than governments." Of the attacks against American interests in 1996, the report says, 50 were against civilian businesses compared with four against military and two against other government targets.

Weapons of terror promise to become more insidious, especially biological weapons that are easier and cheaper to produce than chemical or nuclear weapons. Says James Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, another Washington think tank, a "bioterrorist attack will cause mass casualties because densely populated areas make lucrative targets." Enough anthrax, for instance, can be carried in a briefcase to kill tens of thousands of unsuspecting people.

In an otherwise scary conference, there was one bright spot: An official of the Central Intelligence Agency said "no known instance of a successful transaction in trafficking of nuclear materials was detected last year."

In the next breath, however, the official said "the CIA's reliable reporting on this is limited and fragmentary."

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Richard Halloran, a former New York Times
correspondent in Asia, is a Honolulu-based writer.