For most Americans, the 9/11 attacks came out of the blue. But the commission's report shows that the threat was right in front of their eyes for almost a decade
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 3:55 p.m. ET June 17, 2004
June 17 - French policemen were shouting at tourists, blowing whistles, fanning out through terminal 2A at Charles de Gaulle International Airport outside of Paris, driving the crowd before them in a deliberate, relentless push to clear the center of the building. "Back up! Réculez! Back up!"
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We did. "The bomb squad is coming," one of the cops explained to the fretful throng of American, British, Chinese, French and African people headed to and from all corners of the world last Tuesday morning. There was an abandoned suitcase outside on the sidewalk. Probably not a bomb. But who could be sure? "If it really blows, there might be a shower of glass," another cop explained, pointing at the floor-to-ceiling windows. He rubbed his throat and cleared it, now that everyone was out of the potential kill zone. "I'm losing my voice," he said. "This is the sixth one of these today."
Half a dozen bomb alerts at a single international hub in a single morning: that's just one measure of the siege mentality that's settled in on us as we begin our summer vacations. But like false alarms anywhere in the world, these normally go unreported. "We don't communicate on that topic," says a spokesman for the French Ministry of Interior. To my knowledge, there is no public clearinghouse for information on might-have-been-but-weren't terrorist attacks, and until 11 September 2001, the public and the press didn't even pay much attention to full-fledged terrorist plots that failed—which were the surest indicator of the evil intent gathering like a storm on the horizon.
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The impression most Americans had was that one moment the nation was perfectly safe, and the next it was engaged in a war for survival. Only gradually have they come to understand that the threat from Osama bin Laden and his like was growing, and was right in front of their eyes for almost a decade. The preliminary reports of the 9/11 commission this week trace the history back to 1993, at least, and the first attack on the World Trade Center, but much of what's now being revealed is really a review of what we knew at the time: bad guys were plotting to bring massive terror to the United States by blowing up its landmarks and hijacking its planes. We were just lucky, then, that they weren't better at their jobs. (One key terrorist was caught in 1999 by an unusually alert customs agent at a very sleepy crossing on the Canadian border.)
Nor did the threat begin with bin Laden. Libyan dictator Muammar Kaddafi allegedly dispatched a Japanese terrorist, Yu Kikumura, to set off powerful bombs on Wall Street in 1988. Again, it was pure good fortune that a state trooper picked up Kikumura on the New Jersey Turnpike and found the explosives disguised as fire extinguishers in the back of his car.
What we discovered on 9/11 was that our dumb luck had run out, and we had to get smart about the real threat. To do that, it's vitally important to keep good records. They're the surest guide we have to the future, and also the best protection we have against paranoia. For years, those of us who follow these trends have relied on the State Department's annual report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism," to help us make reasonable judgments about the real threats that confront us.
But this year's edition, I'm sorry to say, was so wildly misleading that you've got to wonder if the people who put it together were idiots, or merely think that we are.
You may recall that the unclassified report came out in April with some good news: "the lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969," and this was presented by the administration as "clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" against terror. But none of that was true. As a couple of professors from Princeton and Stanford pointed out a month later (and, frankly, we in the press should have noted long before), the numbers didn't add up. When the totals were calculated accurately, according to Alan B. Krueger and David Laitin, significant terrorist incidents were at a 20-year high, up 35 per cent from 2001.
The books were cooked (or the honest miscalculations made, depending on how you want to spin this) by compiling what are called "nonsignificant terrorist events" along with the significant ones. The "nons" declined by 90 percent over two years, it was said. But, er, what is a nonsignificant terrorist event? We the public don't know, and the State Department, so far, hasn't told us. A "significant" event is defined in the report as one that "results in loss of life or serious injury to persons, major property damage, and/or is an act or attempted act that could reasonably be expected to create the conditions noted." So a nonsignificant event is not a near miss, it would seem. Is it an anonymous phone call? Or someone throwing rocks? Or a piece of luggage abandoned at an airport?
Some hints to the significance of nonsignificance may be found in the record-keeping of the Israeli government. There was an arresting passage in the report of the international commission led by former senator George Mitchell in 2001 to study the outbreak of ferocious violence between Israelis and Palestinians seven months earlier. Among its observations: the government of Israel claimed that it was engaged in "an armed conflict short of war" and therefore didn't have to investigate the deaths of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers. Yet the government of Israel acknowledged that "of some 9,000 'attacks' by Palestinians against Israelis" in the first three months of the uprising, only about 30 percent involved the use of firearms or explosives. It was lumping significant and nonsignificant acts together to get higher numbers, in that case. "Notwithstanding the danger posed by stone-throwers," the Mitchell Report suggested, "effort should be made to differentiate between terrorism and protests." So maybe it was violent protests that declined around the world from 2001 to 2003, while all that significant terrorism was actually on the rise.
Rep. Henry Waxman, the Democratic congressman from California who's made a specialty of crunching the administration with its own numbers, sent a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell a month ago asking for clarification on these points. Last week, Ambassador Richard Boucher admitted that "here at the Department of State, we did not check and verify the data sufficiently" after it was received from the newly established Terrorist Threat Integration Center. "Our preliminary results indicate that the figures for the number of attacks and casualties will be up sharply from what was published," said Boucher, the department's official spokesman. "As soon as we are in a position to, we will issue corrected numbers, a revised analysis, and revisions to the report."
Let's hope. Boucher's office tells me the new numbers could be out "as soon as tomorrow—but not today."
And next year's numbers? No matter how detailed, I don't think they'll include those abandoned bags at the Paris airport. The French bomb squad sent a little robot up to each one, where it used a small explosive charge to carry out a controlled detonation. Various and sundry harmless garments, athletic trainers and toiletries were blown to smithereens. Then the bomb squad gave the all clear and travelers rushed back into line to take their planes.
For the record, everything's gone back to normal. I just wish the record were more trustworthy.
