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Boogie Man · Moderator Joined: 25 Jan 2005 Posts: 43

"War on Terror 2011"
January 29, 2005

A leading expert on counterterrorism imagines the future history of the
war on terror - 10 years after terrorists struck on September 11, 2001.
Richard Clarke, former White House terrorism tzar and author of Against
All Enemies, paints a picture of a country still at war in 2011.

2001-2004: THE RESPONSE

Having ignored al-Qaeda until September 11, 2001, President George Bush
responded to the attack in three ways. First, he ordered an end to the
terrorist sanctuary in Afghanistan. For the next five years a token US
military force assisted the Kabul government in its attempts to rule
the warlords and suppress the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Second, he moved to
strengthen US domestic law enforcement with the first Patriot Act (a law
that civil libertarians would find benign from today's perspective) and
the Department of Homeland Security, which in those early years of the
war on terror was largely ineffectual. Third, Bush ordered the
ill-fated invasion and occupation of Iraq, which effectively turned his
Administration into an active recruiting office for al-Qaeda and other jihadi
groups around the world.

The move against Afghanistan did set al-Qaeda and the jihadi movement
back. Although regional affiliates were able to stage spectacular
attacks in Riyadh, Istanbul, Bali, Madrid, Baghdad, and elsewhere, and
although there were twice as many attacks worldwide in the three years after
9/11 as there had been in the five years before that day, no
al-Qaeda-related attacks took place in the US in the years immediately following
9/11.

The several years without an attack on US soil lulled some Americans
into thinking that the war on terror was taking place only overseas. Few
corporations increased security spending. Americans increasingly
questioned Bush's security policies, the Patriot Act, and Secretary of
Homeland Security Tom Ridge's ridiculed colour codes. In the 2004
presidential election Bush won a second term in part by dismissing such issues as
whether the mishandling of the Iraq War had made us less secure,
whether we had paid enough attention to al-Qaeda, and whether we were
adequately addressing our vulnerabilities at home.

The US attack on Iran in 2007 brought that country's full power to bear
on American people, with tragic results.Then the second wave of
al-Qaeda attacks hit America. Since then we have spiralled downward in terms
of economic strength, national security, and civil liberties. No one
could stand here today, in 2011, and say that America has won the war on
terror. To understand how we failed, and exactly what has been lost
along the way, I want to look at the past seven years in some detail.

2005: RETURN TO THE HOMELAND BATTLE

The US Government had predicted that future attacks, if they came,
would likely be on financial institutions, noting that Osama bin Laden had
issued instructions to destroy the US economy. Thus when the casinos
were attacked, it was a surprise. It shouldn't have been; we knew that
Las Vegas had been under surveillance by al-Qaeda since at least 2001.
Despite that knowledge, casino owners had done little to increase
security, not wanting to slow people down on their way into the city's
pleasure palaces. Theme park owners were also locked into a pre-9/11, "it
can't happen here" mindset, and consequently were caught off guard, as New
Yorkers and Washingtonians had been in 2001. The first post-9/11
attacks on US soil came not from airplanes but from backpacks and Winnebagos.
They were aimed at places where we used to have fun, what we then
called "vacation destinations". These places were particularly hard to
defend.

Peter and Margaret Rataczak, of Wichita, Kansas, were the first to die
on June 29, 2005, in a new wave of suicide attacks launched against the
United States in retaliation for the killing of Osama bin Laden that
spring, and for the continuing presence of US troops in Iraq. These
attacks were every bit as well planned as those of 9/11 and, in typical
al-Qaeda fashion, used low-technology means to achieve maximum public
impact.

What we know about the attacks' planning and execution comes in large
part from tourists who provided photos and video from their travels.
Without these images we might never have known that the Rataczaks' killers
were non-Arab. It would also have been harder to discover that they
seem to have entered the United States by driving across the border from
Canada.

In order to save money for the poker tables that night, Peter chose to
stay at an RV campground, parking his Winnebago at about 4pm. Shortly
thereafter a casually dressed Asian couple approached the Rataczaks'
secluded campsite with a map unfolded in front of them. Only the birds
heard the silenced shots. The first murders by the group calling itself
al-Qaeda of North America had been carried out.

With the bodies in the back of the darkened camper, the Asian couple
drove back toward a safe house they had quietly rented in the hills. The
man quickly backed into the garage and loaded an ammonium nitrate
device into the van. His leader had said the device would force the
unbelievers in "Sin City" to realise that even in their ignorance they were
guilty of conspiring with the Zionists to destroy Islam. After a good
night's sleep and his morning prayers, the man carefully helped the woman
into her vest and belt before leaving her to finish dressing and
praying.

It was only an hour's drive to the city limits, and the man was careful
never to exceed the speed limit. State troopers at the exit ramp to the
city ignored the van. At 3pm the streets were packed as crowds wandered
the Strip. On Tropicana Avenue the man stopped briefly to let his
partner out with an exchange of nods and a whispered statement: "God is
great". The woman blended seamlessly into the flow of people walking into
the Florentine casino, looking like one of the millions of annual
visitors to Las Vegas from the Pacific Rim. She seemed a little heavy for her
frame, and the jacket she wore seemed a little out of place in the
heat, but the doormen, as security videos later showed, didn't even give
her a second look. She had been there many times before.

The woman never hesitated. She walked to the roulette table, 20 metres
from the front door, and pushed a detonator, blowing herself up. The
explosion instantly killed 38 people standing and sitting at nearby
tables. The nails and ball bearings that flew out of the woman's vest and
belt wounded more than a hundred others, even though slot machines
absorbed many of the miniature missiles. Eighteen of the hundreds of elderly
gamblers in the casino suffered heart attacks that proved fatal when
they could not be treated fast enough amid the rubble.

Just seconds later, the man drove his van into the lobby of the Lion's
Grand and detonated his cargo. This bomb was designed to wreak
tremendous damage that would remain in the consciousness of the American people
for years to come. Whereas the damage done to the Florentine casino was
repaired in just under a month, the billion-dollar Lion's Grand was
closed for more than a year while security enhancements and structural
improvements were made. Losing the use of 5034 rooms, plus casino gaming
and concerts and other special events, cost the Lion's Grand a million
dollars a day, and damaged its bond rating.

The long-term economic effects continue today: tourism in Las Vegas has
never returned to its pre-2005 level, and unemployment in the city is
at 28 per cent.

The attacks in Nevada occurred at almost the same time as the ones in
Florida, California, Texas and New Jersey. Two women strolling
separately through Mouseworld's Showcase of the Future detonated their exploding
belts in the vicinity of tour groups in the "Mexican Holiday" and
"Austrian Biergarten" exhibits. Similar attacks took place at WaterWorld, in
California; Seven Pennants, near Dallas; and the Rosebud Casino, in
Atlantic City. By the end of the day, 1032 people were dead and more than
4000 wounded. The victims included many children and elderly citizens.
Among the dead were only eight terrorists, two each from Iraq,
Indonesia, Pakistan and the Philippines.

The next morning CNN's Los Angeles bureau received a video purporting
to be from al-Qaeda of North America. On the tape the group claimed
responsibility for the incidents and pledged that attacks would continue
until America left the Middle East. We can all recall the soft, steely
voice in which the chilling words were delivered: "We are not terrorists.
We are patriots trying to throw off the mantle of an oppressive
society. We do not look like you think we do. And we will kill you until you
leave our holy lands."

The social effect of the attacks was widespread. In Detroit, northern
New Jersey, northern Virginia, and southern California armed gangs of
local youths attacked Mosques and Islamic centres. At the request of
local clerics, the governor of Michigan ordered National Guard units into
the city of Dearborn and parts of Detroit to stop the vigilante violence
against Islamic residents.

The reaction from the White House and Congress was swift. Patriot Act
II, which had been languishing on Capitol Hill, passed in July. As more
evidence was made public, it became increasingly clear that the attacks
had been perpetrated by terrorists who were in the United States
illegally, either on false passports or having overstayed their visas. Two
were Iraqis pretending to be South Africans, using passports that had
been stolen in Cape Town the year before. Others had actually been picked
up before the attacks for being "out of visa status", but had been
released because immigration detention facilities were full.

The attorney-general sought broad emergency powers to impose extended
pre-arraignment detention, investigative confinement, broader
material-witness authority and expanded deportation authority.

After the passage of Patriot Act II, federal agents conducted
large-scale roundups of illegal immigrants and members of ethnic groups that
were suspected of hiding terrorists in their midst. Many citizens who had
been forcibly detained were held "with probable cause" for allegedly
"planning, assisting, or executing an act of terrorism". Many detainees,
if they failed to produce proof of citizenship or immigrant status,
were moved to new DHS illegal-immigration detention facilities for further
investigation and possible deportation.

The camps were in remote areas, including one in Arizona that ended up
holding 42,000 suspected illegals.

Although the American Civil Liberties Union vigorously condemned these
roundups, most of the public accepted them as a suitable precaution
against possible future attacks and a brake on further vigilante violence.

The fear that follow-on attacks were likely was enough to satisfy the
judiciary that state and federal law enforcement should be allowed to
begin broad sweeps of communities suspected of harbouring sympathisers.
In short, "the gravest imminent danger to the public safety," which had
justified the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War
II, was invoked again to support the widespread use of pre-trial
detentions and material-witness warrants.

Over the objections of the Pentagon, Congress had in 2004 created a
cabinet-level director of national intelligence and given the position
budgetary control of all intelligence agencies and operational control
over all agencies except the Defense Intelligence Agency and the armed
services' individual intelligence branches. By this point most Americans
were well aware of the lapses in US intelligence produced by a lack of
spies in the Middle East. Not long after 9/11 George Tenet, then the
director of the CIA, had suggested that it would take at least five years
to raise the CIA's human-intelligence capacity to where it needed to
be. Tenet turned out to have been right: it took more than five years to
train even a fraction of the new field agents needed for a global war
on terror.

One price the United States has paid for security is a significant
decrease in foreign students at our colleges and universities, effectively
preventing young people from all over the world from meeting one
another and building bridges between warring ideologies. Foreign attendance
is now down by more than a third from what it was in 2001, resulting in
the closure or consolidation of some graduate programs in science and
engineering, and producing severe budget cuts in others.

On December 2, 2005, the Mall of the States became a victim of a
low-tech terrorist attack. In the preceding years malls in Israel, Finland,
and the Philippines had been attacked; so far, American malls had been
spared. As security professionals knew, this was partly luck; such
targets are difficult to protect.

In June of 2004, after learning of intelligence reports indicating that
the Madrid train bombers had originally planned to strike a suburban
shopping area, Charles Schumer, a Democratic senator from New York,
called for increased funding to secure US shopping centres and malls.
Congress chose instead to focus on defending other targets against more
sophisticated terrorist acts.

The 4.2 million-square foot mall, located in Minnesota, was globally
recognised as the largest entertainment and retail complex in America,
welcoming more than 42 million visitors each year, or 117,000 a day.

On this day neither the 160 security cameras surveying the mall nor the
150 safety officers guarding it were able to detect, deter or defend
against the terrorists. Four men, disguised as private mall security
officers and armed with TEC-9 submachine guns, street-sweeper 12-gauge
shotguns and dynamite, entered the mall at two points and began executing
shoppers at will.

It had not been hard for the terrorists to buy all their guns legally,
in six different states across the Midwest.

A year earlier, Congress had failed to reauthorise the assault weapons
ban. Attorney-General John Ashcroft had announced a proposal, on July
6, 2001, to have the FBI destroy records of weapons sales and background
checks the day after the gun dealer had the sale approved. This meant
that if a gun buyer subsequently turned up on the new Integrated Watch
List, or was discovered by law-enforcement officials to be a felon or a
suspected terrorist, when government authorities tried to investigate
the sale the record of the purchase would already be on the way to the
shredder.

By the time the smoke had cleared, more than 300 people were dead and
400 lay wounded. In the confusion of the firefight, the SWAT team had
killed six mall guards and wounded two police officers.

At the same moment at the Tower Place, in Chicago, the Crystal Place,
in Dallas, the Rappamassis Mall, in Virginia, and the Beverly Forest
Mall in Los Angeles, the scene was much the same: four shooters and
hundreds of dead shoppers. America's holiday mall shopping effectively ended
that day, as customers retreated to the safety of online retail.

2006: MOBILISING THE HOME FRONT

Well before the end of the first quarter of 2006 the economic effects
of the previous year's attacks were clear. The closing of casinos and
theme parks around the US had increased only regional unemployment, but
the national effect on the already ailing airline industry was
significant. The pre-Christmas attacks on shopping centres had been the most
damaging of all. Economic indicators in the first quarter of 2006 showed
the dramatic ripple effect of the collapse of retail shopping on top of
the earlier economic devastation of recreational travel: GDP growth was
negative, and unemployment hit 9.5 per cent in January.

When the president delivered his State of the Union speech in January,
he called for immediate passage of Patriot Act III. "We are a nation at
war," he said. "We need to start acting that way. We can no longer be
in denial. We must mobilise the home front."

To that end he proposed four things: adding 200,000 soldiers to the
army, to compensate for National Guard shortfalls; deploying three
squadrons of new unmanned aerial vehicles to conduct reconnaissance in the US;
suspending the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act (which had prevented the
military from conducting arrests in the US); and modifying the charter of the
National Security Agency to permit "unfettered use of its capabilities"
in support of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Several
senators denounced the plan as the militarisation of America, and vowed
to filibuster to stop the law's passage. Polls showed that 62 per cent
of Americans believed the president knew best what was needed to defend
the nation.

Then came Subway Day. Public transport in Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore
and Philadelphia were all struck at 8.15am on a Monday in April. Unlike
the previous year's attacks, these strikes did not appear to involve
suicides. The bombs were apparently hidden on trains while they sat in
rail yards, or placed in newspaper racks and ticket machines. "We knew
something was up," the homeland-security secretary said, in a remark that
many believe led to his resignation a week later. "We hesitated to
raise the alert level to red again because we lacked actionable
intelligence and we didn't want an increase in the terror alert to tip off the
terrorists." More than 200 people died and more than 3,000 were injured.

Thursday was Railroad Day. Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs,
popularised by Iraqi insurgents after the American invasion exploded as
interstate trains passed by or over them in Virginia, Colorado, Missouri,
Connecticut, and Illinois. The five charges resulted in almost 100
deaths. Among the fatalities was the national rail service itself, as
terrorists finally broke congressional will to fund the money-losing venture
any further: 23 kilograms of explosives had accomplished what no
appropriations committee could. The service suspended operations that day and
went into liquidation the next month.

Most analysts now agree that Subway Day and Railroad Day not only
caused the Senate filibuster to end, permitting the passage of Patriot Act
III, but also finally triggered the withdrawal of some 40,000 troops
from Iraq. The army was needed in the subways.

In announcing the Reaction Enclave Strategy, the CENTCOM commander
acknowledged, "Our goal now is just to prevent Iraq from becoming a series
of terrorist training camps. If the new Iraqi army can't keep the peace
among the factions, that's its problem." The strategy, also adopted in
Afghanistan, has reduced the US force deployment to those troops
necessary to sanitise the area around the US Counter-Terrorism Reaction Force
camps.

Although some have criticised military and political leaders for
allowing Iraq and Afghanistan to become "failed states" again, our reaction
forces s do at least retain the ability to strike terrorist facilities
whenever they are detected. Improved intelligence collection and
analysis have increased the success rate of these forces and limited
collateral damage.

The attacks in April of 2006 finally made possible the creation of the
National Transportation Security Identity Card, or SID, as we now call
it. Recall that before 2006 each of the 50 states actually issued its
own card, in the form of a driver's licence. The SID is a biometric
smart card with the owner's photo, retinal signature, fingerprints, Social
Security number, birthday, and address encoded on it. It has (so far)
proved foolproof. Today a SID is required for passage through
card-reader turnstiles at train stations and airports. Soon all cars and trucks
will be equipped with SID readers connected to their ignition systems.

Even Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, whose wariness of
unnecessary government intrusion is well known, acknowledged several
years earlier that a national ID card would offer some benefits. Just a few
weeks after 9/11, Dershowitz wrote:

"Anyone who had the card could be allowed to pass through airports or
building security more expeditiously, and anyone who opted out could be
examined much more closely. As a civil libertarian, I am instinctively
sceptical of such trade-offs. But I support a national identity card
with a chip that can match the holder's fingerprint. It could be an
effective tool for preventing terrorism, reducing the need for other
law-enforcement mechanisms, especially racial and ethnic profiling, that pose
even greater dangers to civil liberties."

The American Civil Liberties Union had disagreed, arguing not only that
the government would misuse ID cards but also that corporations would
be allowed to learn more about our private habits, and that
foreign-looking people would still suffer more discrimination. The National Rifle
Association made common cause with the ACLU, noting that requiring gun
buyers to use the card would create a de facto gun registry. For several
years the ACLU, the NRA, and their supporters helped prevent the
introduction of a national ID card. After the mall massacres, perpetrated
with assault rifles, Congress finally broke ranks with its NRA donors.

Not only has the SID card increased identity security, but it could
ultimately yield billions of dollars in savings by reducing bureaucracy.
Local governments are using it to improve the delivery of state services
and to cut down on waste and fraud by adding other information (gun and
fishing licences; welfare, unemployment, and insurance information) to
the card.

The SID uses the same technology that has been put in place on all
shipping containers, which now have tags that can provide location data
when swept by a radar beam. Radar beams from towers, unmanned aerial
vehicles and even satellites cause a SID to emit a signal that goes to the
transceiver on the return beam. That signal gives the card's number, and
a processor computes its location. The signal is no stronger than that
used for years at airports and in police speed traps. It is almost
certainly safe, according to studies by the National Institutes of Health.

The suspension of rail transport for parts of 2006, along with the
collapse of the national rail service and some of the airlines, exacerbated
economic problems that had emerged in 2005 and caused unemployment to
reach double digits by December. The GDP declined again, as the
manufacturing and retail sectors suffered. The federal deficit as a percentage
of GDP reached a new high, because the government needed to pay for
additional security measures but, with the economy in such poor shape,
didn't dare raise taxes.

2007: IRAN AND SAUDI ARABIA

At the beginning of the year, three decisions demonstrated the
differences between America and Europe yet again.

First, Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska, sponsored a
resolution calling on the Administration to reach out to the Islamic world
with a number of specific proposals and to join the proposed EU
Tolerance and Reconciliation Initiative. For several years Hagel had been
articulating a foreign-policy strategy based on the "humble" approach
promised by President Bush before 9/11. Early in 2007 the Administration
rejected the Hagel resolution as "buckling under to terrorists". The plan
went down to defeat in the Senate.

Second, the European Union reached a compromise on the issue of
admitting Turkey. The EU President claimed that Turkey's membership would
destabilise the "Christian EU" and flood Europe with Muslim immigrants.
Turkey agreed to a limit on immigration and was admitted. The EU passed
the Tolerance and Reconciliation Initiative and opened talks with the
nations of the Islamic Conference.

Third, the US and Europe parted ways over what to do about "definitive
intelligence" showing that Iran had six nuclear devices ready to be
mounted on mobile long-range missiles. The war on terror had distracted US
national security officials from dealing with Iran and nuclear
proliferation generally.

We had suspected that Iran had assembled some nuclear weapons, but only
owing to the good work of the British Secret Intelligence Service did
we learn that all the weapons would be in one place at one time. The
president decided to launch a pre-emptive attack; given the circumstances,
he could hardly have done otherwise. The B-2 strike in May did
indisputably destroy all the mobile missiles and their launchers. (Regrettably,
it also killed some Chinese defence contractors.) To the president's
dismay, the attack apparently did not destroy any of the nuclear
warheads, because they had not yet arrived at the base. The good news was that
without their missiles, the Iranians had few ways of using their
nuclear warheads. The bad news was that this revived fears that the warheads
would fall into terrorist hands.

The Iranians responded to the attack by launching their older Scud
missiles, armed with conventional warheads, at the Saudi oil facilities at
Ras Tanura. Iranian navy units attacked Saudi tankers. The result of
all this was quite unsettling, both to regional stability and to the US
economy. World oil prices spiked to $US81 a barrel, before falling back
to US$72 a month later.

Then, on the day before Thanksgiving, Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shiite
militia, and special operatives of Iran's elite Qods ("Jerusalem") Force
acted. (They no doubt chose that day because it was then still a
relatively heavy travel day in America.)

"Stinger Day", as it came to be known, did not actually involve Stinger
missiles, as originally thought. Rather, the missiles were SA-14s and
SA-16s stolen from Iraqi army stockpiles way back in 2003, after the US
invasion. The United States had failed to secure the Iraqi weapons
depots, giving terrorists an opportunity to help themselves to Saddam
Hussein's guns, explosives, and missiles. The missiles were later smuggled
across the Canadian border into Minnesota, Washington, and Montana.

SA-14s and SA-16s are much like Stingers, heat-seeking and easily
portable. The four missile strikes that succeeded that day (in Atlanta,
Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles) were all aimed at 767s. The death toll was
nearly 1200, including those who died on the ground where the aircraft
crashed. There is some dispute about whether three or four additional
attempts failed in other cities. The most widely reported incident
involved the killing by New Jersey state police officers of two Lebanese
Hezbollah members who had been discovered sitting in a car with an SA-14
on a police ramp over I-95 next to Newark International.

Scarcely six years after 9/11 had briefly shut down commercial aviation
and driven several major airlines into bankruptcy, the same thing
occurred again.

The US bombers that struck Iran had been refuelled from and then landed
in Saudi Arabia. This gave fundamentalist forces in that country the
spark and the distraction they needed to finally stage a coup against the
regime, which they did in August. The coup succeeded, and the House of
Saud was driven out, at which point the price of oil reached the
vicinity of US$85 a barrel and stayed there.

The Saudi coup marked one of the worst US intelligence failures in
years. We were caught off guard because we had not been able to effectively
collect intelligence inside "the kingdom", as it was then called. We
relied on the Saudi Ministry of the Interior to tell us how strong the
jihadis were, and whether there was serious opposition to the king. As it
turned out, opposition was widespread, even among the royal family and
the Saudi National Guard that had been created to protect it.

The main stimulus for the coup probably came from the many Saudis who
had returned from neighbouring Iraq, where they had been radicalised by
their experiences fighting the US occupation. Osama bin Laden's final,
pre-death request, captured on video and broadcast worldwide on
al-Jazeera and other media networks, was that the royal family be deposed. It
unexpectedly unified a variety of Saudi dissident groups.

By dawn on the third day of the coup, the surviving members of the
House of Saud had fled or were in prison, the oil fields were in the hands
of troops loyal to the ruling clerics, and all foreigners were being
rounded up and escorted to the airports or the borders. Iraq was the
first country to acknowledge the new government. Other Gulf states soon
followed.

Had the United States welcomed the new government, which we now know as
Islamiyah, the effect on the world oil market might have been
different. Instead we cut off the flow of spare parts needed to maintain the
billions of dollars' worth of high-tech arms we had sold to the Saudis
throughout the 1980s and 1990s; we also withdrew the US contractors who
knew how to make the systems work. Naturally, the new regime responded by
cancelling all oil contracts between US firms and Saudi Arabia's
national oil company. The company made up much of what it had lost in dumping
the US contracts by signing new long-term deals with China; recent
economic growth had raised China's demand for overseas oil to about the
level of America's, which had been depressed by economic stagnation. The
dislocation in the world oil supply was short-lived, but it was a cold
winter in the northern US that year.

2008: ELECTION YEAR AND VIRTUAL WAR

Iran's hostile reaction to the US bombing continued into 2008 and made
use of Hezbollah allies. (Hezbollah, although composed largely of
Palestinians and Lebanese, was created in the 1980s by Iran, which closely
controlled it for more than 20 years.)

Iran also employed its Qods Force, the covert arm of its Revolutionary
Guards. American counter-terrorism specialists had always feared
Hezbollah and the Qods Force, because their "tradescraft" was so superior to
that of other terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda and its many
progeny.

Diplomats and military leaders had for years used numerous back
channels to keep both groups on the sidelines while the US engaged in
counter-terrorist warfare. The US attack on Iran brought that country's full
power to bear on American people, with tragic results.

Working with the remnants of al-Qaeda, the Iranians staged a
significant cyber attack in the US during the 2008 election year. Reliance on
cyberspace for retail had, of course, increased significantly after the
many mall closings.

More importantly, America had been using cyberspace to control its
critical infrastructure since the late 1990s. Electrical power grids, gas
pipelines, train networks, and banking and financial markets all
depended on computer-controlled systems connected to the internet. Former US
president Bill Clinton had acknowledged this dependence and
vulnerability in a 1998 presidential directive. Former president George Bush had
articulated the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace in 2003, but he
had done little to implement it. Many nations, including Iran, had
created information-warfare units and did surveillance on US networks.

The cyber attack began with a "zero day worm", a piece of
self-propagating software that exploited a hitherto unknown vulnerability in a
widely used computer operating system. The worm bypassed computer firewalls
and placed applets on companies' networks. The applets sent back covert
messages describing what kind of network they had penetrated.

Then, all at once, the worms erased the operating systems on key
computers throughout the US, and in their place installed a program that
caused the computers to repeatedly reboot whenever they were turned on.
Freight trains stopped. Power stations shut down. Banks and brokerage
houses froze. In some cities the emergency-call systems crashed; in others
traffic lights shut off.

Then, as cyber-security teams were attempting to figure out what had
happened, a second worm penetrated the operating system of the most
widely used routers on US computer networks. Once inside, the worm found the
routing tables, called border gateway protocols, that told internet
traffic where to go. It scrambled the tables so that packets were lost in
cyberspace. Confused by the traffic errors, many of the routers
exceeded their processing capabilities and collapsed.

The stock market closed, as did the commodities markets. Major
hospitals cancelled all but emergency surgeries and procedures. Three major
power grids experienced brownouts. Police and state militia units were
ordered into the cities to maintain order and minimise looting. Millions
of Americans, now staring at blank computer screens, were sent home from
work.

The already reeling economy took another hit. The US software industry
was hurt the most. As a result, open-source software, which had already
spread widely in Europe and Asia, now dominates US servers, routers,
and desktops. The "free" software movement badly hurt revenues at several
US firms.

Intervention by the new Federal Cyber Security Service, through its
monitoring of all internet traffic, has since somewhat reduced the
prevalence of worms and viruses. Although some Americans complained about loss
of privacy, others noted the benefits, such as a significant reduction
in the volume of spam email.

During the election campaign the two major parties had attempted to
outdo each other in their anti-terror fervour. The similarity of their
hawkish strategies helped give rise to an influential third party, the
American Liberty Party, which challenged the Patriot Acts.

San Francisco's mayor, a Chinese-American woman, surprised the experts
by garnering 12 per cent of the popular vote for the presidency on a
platform built almost exclusively on shoring up civil liberties. Two new
governors were elected on the American Liberty ticket, as were fourteen
congressmen, who became a vocal minority in the new Congress.

2009: 'NUKE SQUADS' AND THE NEW DRAFT

The Homeland Protection and Service Act of 2009 could not have been
introduced in an election year. Had the president proposed it in 2008, it
is likely that the American Liberty Party would have roused even more
support than it did. The "new draft", as its opponents have labelled it,
is different in important respects from other conscriptions in US
history. Conscripts are randomly selected and may serve any two consecutive
years, as long as their service begins before they are aged 22. Most
draftees are given monitoring or first-responder jobs here at home; few
are required to go through weapons training. Despite these differences
from Vietnam-era conscription, draft dodging and AWOLs have already
become such a large problem that the US Marshals have created special
squads to hunt down recalcitrants and force them back into service.

Shortly after his inauguration, the president announced that US
intelligence had detected plans by Iran and Hezbollah to bring nuclear weapons
into America in retaliation for the US bombing of Iran. He announced
the Safe Sea Approaches Program, which required all ships within 200
nautical miles of the US coast to broadcast on a satellite frequency,
squawking their location, name, departure and destination ports, and cargo.
Ships not complying would be intercepted and might be sunk. In the
first months of the program only one ship, a small Yemeni-flagged oil
tanker bound for a refinery in Trinidad, was sunk, by a US attack submarine
120 nautical miles off Puerto Rico, causing limited environmental
damage.

Concerned that Iran had already slipped nuclear weapons into the
country, the Department of Homeland Security greatly expanded its nuclear
search-and-disarmament teams, or "nuke squads", as they became known.
Under an amendment to Patriot Act III the squads were empowered to search
"anywhere, anytime", with Geiger counters and other devices that could
detect gamma rays and neutron flux. Initially, federal courts differed
on whether other illegal materials found in these searches could be used
as a basis for arrests; the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that
searches for nuclear arms did not require a warrant, and that incriminating
material found in such searches could be used as court evidence.

When Canada refused to allow US nuke squads to conduct warrantless
searches at customs stations on the Canadian side of the border, we built
the Northern Wall, which channelled trucks and freight trains to a
limited number of monitored border crossings. Barbed wire, radar
installations, and thousands of security workers made our border with Canada
resemble our border with Mexico.

The quick and thorough response to the threat of smuggled Iranian
nuclear weapons was successful. Iran was evidently deterred, and no
terrorist nuclear weapons have ever been found in the US or en route to it.

2010: USING OUR OWN CHEMICALS AGAINST US

Three years after a terrorist bomb was detonated on US soil, executive
jets packed with explosives slammed into chlorine-gas facilities in New
Jersey and Delaware. Fortunately, in New Jersey much of the potential
gas cloud was consumed by the flames of the initial explosion, and winds
sent what remained of the plume over a largely uninhabited area.

Delaware, however, was less fortunate: the poisonous cloud produced by
the explosion left 1500 dead and 4000 injured, some as a result of
panic during the evacuation of the Wilmington area.

Both al-Qaeda and Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the attacks on
the chemical plants, although Iran condemned them and offered assistance
to the affected communities. Investigation into the chemical plant
attacks is still officially ongoing.

The US has not yet retaliated, and the Pentagon is reported to have
recommended against a retaliatory bombing of a nuclear-armed Iran. (The
President has publicly denied that the Pentagon made any such
recommendation, and points out that we bombed Iran as recently as 2007.)

Heavy lobbying by the chemical industry in the years following 9/11 had
prevented any congressional regulation that would have imposed
terrorism-specific security requirements or standards on chemical plants near
large municipalities.

Some reports claimed that the Bush Administration had tried to
undermine the Environmental Protection Agency by relaxing the system for
evaluating plant security, in order to reduce the number of facilities deemed
high-risk.

Indeed, both of the facilities that were attacked had at one point been
on the EPA's high-risk list but were not on the Bush Administration's
high-risk list.

Because of this, the facilities did not undergo the security upgrades
that a more severe risk assessment might possibly have induced.

2011: WHAT WE MIGHT HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY

Nine months into this year, we have so far been spared any new
terrorist attacks on American soil. Of course, there have been incidents at our
embassies and some US-owned hotels overseas, as there have been nearly
every year for more than a decade, but they have produced few US
casualties.

Some believe that the jihadi movement has lost its fervour. Others
believe that with jihadi governments holding power in the former Saudi
Arabia and in Pakistan, as well as in large parts of Iraq and Afghanistan,
the terrorists are now too busy governing to be planning further
assaults.

I think the real reason for the diminished number of attacks is that
the US has hardened itself. We have greatly reduced our overseas profile,
generally limiting our presence to highly secure embassies. It has
become extremely difficult for people or cargo to get into or out of the US
without extensive inspection.

The number of security workers per capita within America's borders is
now higher than in any other country, including long-embattled Israel. A
would-be terrorist knows that his communications can easily be
monitored and his vehicles and facilities searched with little provocation. If
suspicious materials are found, or if an informer provides a potential
lead, suspected terrorists can be held for an extensive period pending
investigation.

All this has made it more difficult to carry out attacks on US soil. Of
course, it has also hurt us in world trade, swelled our national debt
and depressed our GDP.

As we mark the 10th anniversary of September 11 and the launch of our
global war on terror, it is hard for many Americans to remember when the
sight of police officers with automatic weapons and body armour was
rare. Yet it wasn't so long ago that we could enter a shopping mall, a
train station, an airport or a public building without "see-through
scanners" and explosive-sniffers.

The use of biometric smart identity cards is now so routine that we can
hardly believe we ever did without them. For all the additional
security these developments have afforded us, however, they have also produced
a powerful political backlash. Polls show that the American Liberty
Party may draw up to a third of the popular vote in the election next
year.

Could the global war on terror have played out differently? If the war
had been restricted to eliminating al-Qaeda in the two years following
9/11, it is possible that the first generation might have been
suppressed before al-Qaeda became a multi-group jihadi movement. In 2002
especially, we squandered opportunities to unite the global community in a
successful counter-terrorism effort. If we had initially sent a more
substantial US force to Afghanistan, bin Laden might have been killed in
the first few weeks of the war, perhaps preventing many of the attacks
that took place around the world in the following three years.

Had we not invaded Iraq, many of the jihadis we know today would never
have been recruited to the terrorists' cause. Not invading Iraq would
also have freed up money for earlier investments in domestic security:
for instance, upgrades for chemical plants, trains, container shipping,
and computer networks. Because we developed most such protective
measures too late, panicking under political pressure, we too often used
brute-force methods that were costly, intrusive, and less effective than we
hoped. With more time, money, and careful consideration, the body
politic might have persuaded the private sector to join the federal
government in a real partnership to enhance the security of critical
infrastructure.

More important, we would have been better able to carry on an open
national dialogue about the trade-offs between security and civil
liberties, and about the ways in which strong civil liberties and strong
domestic security can be mutually reinforcing.

Perhaps, too, we could have followed the proposal of the 9/11
Commission and engaged the Islamic world in a true battle of ideas. Indeed, if
we had not from the start adopted tactics and rhetoric that cast the war
on terror as a new "Crusade", as a struggle of good versus evil, we
might have been able to achieve more popular support in the Islamic world.
Our attempts to change Islamic opinion with an Arabic-language
satellite-television news station and an Arabic radio station carrying rock
music were simply not enough. We talked about replacing the hate-fostering
madrassas with modern educational programs, but we never succeeded in
making that happen.

Nor did we successfully work behind the scenes with our Muslim friends
to create an ideological counterweight to the jihadis. Although we
talked hopefully about negotiated outcomes to the Palestinian conflict and
the struggle in Chechnya, neither actually came to pass. Because we
were afraid to "reward bad behaviour", we let Iranian nuclear-weapons
development get too far along, to the point where our only option was to
attack Iran. This set back the Iranian democratic reform movement and
added Hezbollah to our list of active enemies.

Although we occasionally lectured Arab states about democracy and
reform, we never developed a country-by-country program, or provided
practical steps for moving theocracies and autocracies in that direction.
Moreover, our haranguing Arab governments to be nicer to their citizens
ended up causing a backlash against us, because our exhortations were seen
as hypocritical in view of our bombing, torture and occupation tactics
in Iraq.

It can still be debated whether we accelerated the fall of the House of
Saud with our arrogant tactics. The almost total lack of intelligence
about what was going on in Saudi Arabia before the revolution did,
however, make it hard for US policymakers to develop sound strategies.

Despite years of earnest-sounding talk about "energy independence" and
weaning ourselves from our addiction to foreign oil, no president since
Jimmy Carter in the 1970s has ever seemed serious about these goals. We
never developed truly fuel-efficient vehicles, so our foreign energy
imports drastically harm the economy when oil prices soar.

As early as 2004 our nation's leaders were admitting that the war on
terror would probably last a generation or more, even as they continued
to argue among themselves about whether it could ever truly be won. If
they had acted differently sooner, smarter, we might have been able to
contain what were at one time just a few radical jihadis, and to raise
our defences more effectively. Instead our leaders made the clash of
cultures a self-fulfilling prophecy, turning the first part of the 21st
century into an ongoing low-grade war between religions that made America
less wealthy, less confident, and certainly less free.

- The Atlantic Monthly

ash_wednesday · Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2005 12:29 pm Post subject:

Good theroy. Now how far along the plan are they now?
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Guest · Guest

You're wrong. There has never been terrorist attacks in Finland.

Blowjob Lessons · Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 6:51 am Post subject:

"Guest" appears not to "get" the article.

HINT: It is a work of fiction. Rolling Eyes

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ash_wednesday

Blowjob Lessons · Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2006 8:07 pm Post subject:

I'm inclined to think that if guest brought it up, he knows what he's talking about. I know little about Finland, and I know that you, too, ash, are North American like myself.
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Blowjob Lessons · Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2006 8:33 pm Post subject:

I looked it up, and it appears there really haven't been any terrorist attacks in Finland, ever. The closest thing was the Myyrmanni bombing, which was erroneously referred to by CNN as a "terrorist attack" but whose true motive is unknown.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myyrmanni_bombing

Best to get the facts before one speaks up.
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ash_wednesday · Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2006 12:42 pm Post subject:

But like I have said...that has been reported. I'm guessing there could had been terriorst attack that was not reported or they didn't get caught. etc...
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Blowjob Lessons · Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2006 3:14 am Post subject:

That's an absurd premise. The purpose of a terrorist act is to instill fear. Generally they are fairly attention-getting acts, even if as in the case of 911 (widely thought to be a terrorist act by Al Qaeda or Mugniyeh) the organization doesn't claim responsibility (which by and large they do).
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avdrummerboy · Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 6:42 am Post subject:

A long and very scary article (paper?) Anyway I do see many parallels to todays world. A barrel of oil $85USD we wish Smile

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Blowjob Lessons · Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 5:54 pm Post subject:

What does ash_wednesday think terrorism is, anyway? Any crime committed by a person with brown skin?

One of the few Americans who discusses terrorism and anti-terrorism in a sane, logical way is security guru Bruce Schneier. Read his book, "Beyond Fear".
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hidden · Registered User Joined: 25 Jan 2008 Posts: 16

That is a pretty interesting way to imagine things. I like how it goes from stating what has happened into predicting what could happen in the future. Terrorism is evolving and we need to be on the lookout.
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