It wasn’t long after Sept. 11 that the public discussion turned to the prospect of even worse attacks. The possibility of biological warfare got in our heads, and, for good reason, it’s proving hard to dislocate: Even a moderately successful biological attack could kill millions — and in many cases, rather slowly. Four out of every five Americans believe another attack within the U.S. within a year is either “very likely” or “somewhat likely,” according to a TIME/CNN poll, yet how we as individuals, and as a nation, should best proceed remains murky.
We knew things would be different; we even knew there could be more terrorism, but it took a while before we pieced together the grim possibilities. Suddenly, a raft of germ warfare threats lurks in every paper bag, in every cooler, in every tractor trailer that passes. Some talk of leaving — Isn’t this what Jews should have done when they had the chance in Germany? Are we staying beside the volcano even after it rumbles? — but a good biological weapon will eventually find you. So for now, we stay near the TV, watch for signs.
No hard evidence connects Osama bin Laden to biological weapons, but the Washington Times quoted U.S. intelligence officials on Sept. 26 saying that the Russian mafia has likely been supplying al-Qaida with components for these weapons, and for chemical and nuclear weapons as well. And two years ago, a former Afghan warrior who had trained with bin Laden told the Associated Press that “Osama has dozens of camps. They train on antiaircraft guns, explosives, chemical and biological weapons.”
Nervous or not, most of us believe we’re safe. Given the mounting evidence of an imminent attack, it’s hard to imagine why we feel this way. Consider the following:
Former Soviet bioweapons researcher Ken Alibek, who defected to the U.S. in 1992, told National Public Radio in 1999: “I’m 100 percent sure that some biological weapons and their killing capacity are more effective than some forms of nuclear weapons.” Alibek ran the former Soviet Union’s Bioweapons Directorate for 20 years.
On Sunday, Attorney General John Ashcroft told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “We think that there is a very serious threat of additional problems now, and frankly, as the United States responds, that threat may escalate.”
University of Iowa microbiologist Mary Gilchrist, generally credited with establishing the National Laboratory Network for Bioterrorism Detection, takes issue with those who say dissemination obstacles make germ warfare unlikely. “Someone can carry a small bag of material that can infect hundreds of thousands of people,” she told the AP. “You can carry that bag through virtually every airport security system I’m aware of. It won’t attract attention from a drug-sniffing dog, either … I think it could happen at any time.”
President Clinton said in 1999 that a biological or chemical attack on the U.S. is “highly likely,” and that the threat “keeps [him] awake at night.”
The United Nations Special Commission has shown that Saddam Hussein developed massive quantities of chemical and biological weapons and prepared them so they could be delivered with Scud missiles. It stands to reason that Hussein could be interested in helping bin Laden attack America.
Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., chairman of a House subcommittee on national security, has said, “I am absolutely convinced we’ll have a chemical, biological or nuclear attack. The question is not if, it’s when, where and what will the magnitude be.”
There’s a lot we don’t know, but we do know the following: Our adversaries are serious, they’re willing to die and they have the money to finance a significant operation. We know that reports say bin Laden has been training his followers in biological and chemical warfare, that “hunting down” every terrorist is impossible and that men connected to al-Qaida have looked into acquiring crop-dusting planes and licenses for driving hazardous-materials trucks. We know that bin Laden has said he wants to destroy the United States — quite different from simply sending us a message or effecting a policy change or two.
Read some of the preparedness recommendations from within the medical and research communities — you can almost hear the authors sighing. A recent World Health Organization report claims that a biological attack could well be “on such a scale or of such a nature as to be beyond the capability of the health-care system to cope.” Preparing for such an outbreak at this point is a terrific idea, but it’s also a little like dabbing sunscreen on skin cancer. Our level of readiness would be laughable if it weren’t so cryable. Even if an executive order forced the pharmaceutical industry, state and local hospitals, FEMA and the CDC to devote every single resource to prevention and response programs, it would be years before we approached basic preparedness. Even then, some argue, basic preparedness could mean acknowledging that preparedness is a myth, and a whole new approach to geopolitics is in order.
On Sept. 16, the Washington Post published an extraordinary report detailing the stunning response failures the city of Washington witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The department could not tell its 3,800 officers to go to Stage 3 or Level 5 of response, Gainer said, because it had no stages or levels. There was no list of streets to close to thwart threats, or to make one-way to ease evacuation. Nor were there guidelines spelling out which officers should go where, which buildings must be shut or which emergency vehicles ought to be marshaled. The department had considered having such a plan, Gainer said, “but it was never in the center of my desk, and it was never finalized.”
It’s not just city gridlock. A recent survey of 186 hospitals in four Northwestern states found that 80 percent had no plans for a biological or chemical attack. The survey, published in the American Journal of Public Health, revealed that only 6 percent had taken the minimum recommended preparations for a nerve gas attack like the one Tokyo experienced in 1995.
Randy Larsen, director of the Anser Institute for Homeland Security and former chairman of the National War College in Washington, has spent the last seven years assessing our exposure to bioterrorism. Public health, he says, constitutes “a major part of national security in the 21st century.” Meanwhile, we’re living in the 20th — follow the lack of money, he says: “Hospitals are currently 30 percent in the red, and 50 percent of teaching facilities are in the red.” And Larsen knows exactly what hospital administrators say when someone proposes upgrading facilities to handle germ warfare: “Are you crazy? How does that help my bottom line?”
“We have allowed our healthcare industry to atrophy,” Larsen says. “It’s in horrible condition for the wealthy nation that we are.”
Unbelievably, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told “60 Minutes” on Sunday that the U.S. is “prepared to take care of any contingency, any consequence that develops from any kind of bio-terrorism attack.” Thompson alluded to the eight staging areas throughout the country that contain vaccines, antibiotics, gas masks, ventilators and other supplies. These packages can be shipped out to a disaster site within hours.
What Thompson doesn’t say is that this is a shot in the dark. According to the plan, the supplies will be shipped as soon as a city or region recognizes that an attack has occurred. By and large, recognition means it’s too late. With anthrax, the appearance of symptoms marks the point at which antibiotics are useless. As for the vaccine, it’s been well publicized that we don’t have enough. In fact, we’re not even sure it would work: The anthrax released could be a new strain that’s resistant to vaccination. A report appeared Monday claiming researchers at Harvard Medical School “had identified a gene found in mice that in some forms made mice resistant to anthrax,” according to Reuters. While this development takes us closer to finding an antidote, it will be years before we see anything definitive.
And this is only anthrax. If the terrorists infected us with smallpox, for instance, the supply packages wouldn’t be worth their postage. Unlike anthrax, smallpox is extremely contagious, and no antiviral agents have proven effective in treating it. By the time it was spotted — presumably after the 12- to 14-day incubation period — it would likely be everywhere. Historically, health officials have assumed that an infected person will infect roughly 15 others per day, until he or she has been isolated. If just two terrorists gave themselves smallpox and spent a day in, say, LaGuardia airport, 450 travelers could have smallpox by dinner time. Five days later, by this formula, almost 350 million could have it. And it would still be another week before anyone knew.
Even a clinical description of smallpox is painful to read. According to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies,
After the incubation period, the patient experiences high fever, malaise, and prostration with headache and backache. Severe abdominal pain and delirium are sometimes present. A mascopapular rash then appears, first on the mucosa of the mouth and pharynx, face and forearms, spreading to the trunk and legs. Within one or two days, the rash becomes vesicular and later pustular. The pustules are characteristically round, tense and deeply embedded in the dermis; crusts begin to form about the eighth or ninth day. When the scabs separate, pigment-free skin remains, and eventually pitted scars form.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
The media has focused recently on two indices of panic: the leading anthrax antibiotic and gas masks. Not long after last month’s attacks, word spread that the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin — also a fairly common treatment for urinary tract infections — was already impossible to find, and that obtaining even a cheap gas mask suddenly meant spending hundreds on eBay.
The official response, in turn, has been bizarre and convoluted. In the “60 Minutes” interview, Thompson called gas masks unnecessary, adding: “How would you be able to utilize it? Are you going to have a gas mask with you 24 hours a day?”
Thompson stumbled here into a strange new logic that has emerged in recent conversations about bio-terror. Rather than explain why we shouldn’t panic, we explain that panicking isn’t useful. Ask people why they’re not worried and they give the same shrugging reply: “Worrying doesn’t help.” This is Tommy Thompson logic. Worrying may not help, but what does that have to do with anything, and when did we become so pragmatic?
Is the truth nothing more than a collective failure of imagination? Are we incapable of picturing hundreds of citizens suffering an agonizing death in our own streets? We continue to employ lightning storm reasoning here: If the bolts have your number, they have your number. But germ warfare introduces a radical new element to the existential calculus of weighing risks: instead of lightning’s quick death, we’d suffer prolonged, excruciating, disfiguring pain. Is it still meaningful to say worrying doesn’t help?
Listen to the professional calmers, and at the heart of their reassurance you’ll hear the same rhetorical omission over and over: Everyone says a ninth-grade biology student could make anthrax in his bathtub, they say, but it’s not that easy. Well, we didn’t ask about ninth-grade biology students. We’re interested in what a wealthy, organized and well-connected terrorist is capable of.
As to how to combat such a threat, our options are disturbingly limited. Prevention is possible, desirable and, according to many experts, extremely undependable, if not downright impossible. Relying on quickly getting an antidote to the infected is rife with logistical problems. And, given the incubation period — we could all have anthrax, smallpox, botulism, tularemia or the plague right now, actually — any decision to flee presupposes that a biological attack hasn’t already happened; hardly airtight reasoning if we’ve already accepted the premise that attack is imminent.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has commented on the media’s reluctance to pick up the biowarfare story until recently. He recalls a startling opinion piece in the Washington Post written in 1999 by then-Defense Secretary William Cohen. “In the past year, dozens of threats to use chemical or biological weapons in the United States have turned out to be hoaxes,” Cohen wrote. “Someday, one will be real.”
“I watched carefully to see if anyone followed up on this,” Gelb told the New Yorker recently. “But none of the television networks and none of the elite press even mentioned it … I was astonished.”
Now, nearly a year into the 21st century, America has begun an overhaul of its imaginative capabilities, much as plague-era Europe had to do six centuries ago. The sphere of conceivable terror now extends beyond shark attacks and occasional stray bullets. We go to baseball games, airports and subway stations with a vast and awful new narrative in our heads. Dimly, we can picture the chain of failed intelligence, the harmless-looking cooler at the football game, the cough after breakfast two weeks later, the frantic phone calls, the blocked roads, the clutching at the chest and finally a few lurching steps stumbled down the block.
Much has been said about the new American landscape, or at least our new lens. We grab around for a way to understand what’s happening, and surely someone will eventually write a book about how this period was our Judgment Day: Suddenly, after all, we find ourselves facing an uncertain fate, at the hands of a mysterious and wrathful entity. As we wait for something terrible, we look around us for a glimpse of where we went wrong, of which sins couldn’t be forgiven. Was it McDonald’s? All those terrible movies? Greed? Was it the way we sometimes lose sight of what’s meaningful? Or did we just send too many women to college?
We wait. We wait for our government to announce victory, or for medicine to catch up with evil, or for the first scratches of a cough in the back of the throat. Gas masks and tickets to Alaska — these feel neither realistic nor effectual. Long ago, someone fired a bullet in the air — the advent of biological weapons — and now we must shuffle around nervously wondering where it will land.
On Tuesday, a Senate Appropriations Committee vote effectively highlighted everything that is stupid about politics.
The Transportation Security Administration, a universally loathed government agency, is facing a shortfall, despite its more than $8 billion budget. Instead of having a debate over what effective airport security might actually look like and how much should reasonably be spent on the honestly rare threat of commercial-air-travel-based terrorism, there was a debate over how best to come up with the money needed for all the radioactive naked picture machines and bomb-sniffing dogs. The Democrats suggested passing on the cost of ineffective, cumbersome and intrusive security theater to citizens, via higher fees on airfares. The Republicans, even more predictably, suggested cutting spending that directly helps poor people to ensure there is enough to spend on stopping imaginary future 9/11s.
The newspaper account of the debate in The Hill just reinforced the Republican spin, highlighting the Democrats’ decision to make people spend more money on the hated TSA and downplaying the actual existing Republican alternative to the proposal, which was not “spend less on the hated TSA” but rather “raise money for the hated TSA by slashing needed aid to states.” The Democrats won, or “won,” and now they will earn the fruits of that victory: well-deserved scorn from everyone. And Ben Nelson (D-Troll Town) voted with the Republicans. (Though surely having users pay the fees for supposedly necessary security measures is perfectly conservative, isn’t it? Am I missing something here? I mean besides the fact that the two sides in this debate weren’t actually “liberal” and “conservative” but rather “people who want to come up with a way of paying for the oppressive and useless national security state” versus “people who want there to be an oppressive national security state but hate government spending on feeding and sheltering impoverished people.”)
I don’t know of anyone not employed by the TSA or some other arm of Homeland Security that believes the TSA does a good job and deserves its massive budget, but everyone in Washington apparently feels differently (and is terrified of being blamed for “voting to cut TSA funding” if there is another terrifying and deadly underwear bomber, of course). This is why everyone hates politics and Congress and Washington. This and Iraq. And the drug war.
NEW YORK (AP) — An artist who was setting up an “I Love New York”-themed public art display in Brooklyn was arrested after the wired contraption was mistaken for an explosive device.
Takeshi Miyakawa, a visual artist and furniture designer, was arrested Saturday after placing the installation in two separate areas of the same New York City neighborhood. His lawyer and employer both called the arrest a misunderstanding.
The first apparatus was found Friday morning after a caller reported a suspicious package to police. It consisted of a plastic bag that contained a battery and was suspended from a metal rod attached to a tree. The bag, which had the classic “I Love New York” logo printed on it, was connected by a wire to a plastic box that contained more wires.
The area was evacuated for two hours until a bomb squad determined that the device was not dangerous.
At about 2 a.m. Saturday, a police officer discovered Miyakawa on a ladder not far from where the first contraption was found. Police said he was tying a similar “I Love New York” bag to a public lamp post.
Miyakawa was charged with two counts of first-degree reckless endangerment, two counts of placing a false bomb or hazardous substance in the first degree, two counts of placing a false bomb or hazardous substance in the second degree, two counts of second-degree reckless endangerment and two counts of second-degree criminal nuisance.
A judge ordered him held pending a psychiatric evaluation. His lawyer, Deborah J. Blum, said Monday that she is filing for emergency relief to have Miyakawa released. A court date was set for June 21 to review the results of the evaluation.
“He’s still being held,” Blum said Monday. “I believe that it was a gross misunderstanding and other than that I don’t have any other comment.”
Miyakawa, who was born in Tokyo and is about 50 years old, has worked for a New York-based architect Rafael Vinoly for the last 20 years and also has an independent design practice.
Vinoly’s firm released a statement Monday praising Miyakawa for his “extraordinary brand of professionalism” and said he has been a mentor to generations of young architects.
“Takeshi is a fabulous human being and a person of extraordinary talent,” Vinoly said. “We hope this misunderstanding is cleared up as quickly as possible.”
New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement that the charges sounded “like a wild overreaction.”
“It’s hard to understand why a light-up bag in a tree would be treated as an attempted terrorist act unless there’s more to the story than has been reported in the press thus far,” she said.
In 2007, an artist touched off a terror scare in Boston by placing electronic devices around the city as part of a marketing stunt for Cartoon Network. The city closed bridges, roads and public transit before authorities realized the signs were not bombs.
On an average day, the NYPD receives nearly 100 reports of a suspicious package. Last year, there were more than 4,000 such reports. The number generally rises following any word of terror threats in New York and around the world.
Another deadly plot taken down in the planning stages. This time, thanks to the work of a CIA double agent, officials were able to infiltrate a Yemen-based al-Qaida plot to destroy a U.S.-bound jetliner using a nearly undetectable underwear bomb.The moral of the story: Airport security works!Am I being facetious? Not necessarily. It depends on your definition of airport security.
In my mind, the key to keeping airplanes safe is, and always has been, stopping acts of sabotage while they are still in the planning stages. Here in the age of the TSA checkpoint, with its toothpaste confiscations and obsession with pointy objects, we tend not to think this way, preoccupied instead with a kind of airport Kabuki — the tedious, fanatical screening of passengers and their carry-ons. Real airport security takes place offstage, as it were. It is the job of the folks at the CIA and the FBI, working together with foreign authorities. And while TSA has an important role here too, we can do without the spectacle of airport guards rifling through innocent people’s bags in a pathological hunt for what are effectively harmless items.
The concourse checkpoint needs to be there. Just the same, chances are good that once an adversary has made it to the airport, he or she has engineered a way to outwit the system. And spend as we might, there will always be a way to outwit the system. ”Even if our technology is good enough to spot it,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff, commenting on the news of the latest underwear plot, “technology is still in human hands and we are inherently fallible.”
That’s one of the smartest things I’ve heard a politician utter in some time.
Getting a handle on this takes us all the way back to Sept. 11, 2001, the day that everything, and yet really nothing, changed. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Conventional wisdom holds that the 19 hijackers exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling box cutters onto four Boeing jetliners. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mind-set — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold. (In prior years, a hijacking meant a diversion, perhaps to Havana or Beirut, with hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were accordingly trained in the concept of “passive resistance.”) The presence of box cutters on 9/11 was merely incidental. The men could have used almost anything — a deadly sharp can be fashioned from a broken first-class dinner plate or a ballpoint pen — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The success of their plan relied not on hardware but on the element of surprise. It wasn’t a failure of airport security that allowed those men to hatch their takeover scheme. It was a failure of national security — a breakdown of communication and oversight at the FBI and CIA level.
To put it succinctly: The success of the 9/11 attacks had almost nothing to do with airport security at all — a great and painful irony, of course, to any passenger forced to endure the checkpoint rigmarole in 2012.
Not that frontline guards don’t play a deterrent role. And, in the opinions of some, the plot uncovered in Yemen underscores the value of full-body scanners — those controversial walk-through machines that allow guards to look beneath a passenger’s clothing. It’s a compelling argument, but the way in which these scanners have — and have not — been deployed is apt to make some of us cynical. For instance, the vast majority of body scanners are found at U.S. domestic airports. Overseas, where a bomb is far likelier to originate, they are rare. Is this really about safety, we wonder, or is it about billions of dollars going into the coffers of the companies contracted to build these machines?
And although the scanners are effective, where does the arms race end? Not long ago, the idea that passengers would be marched through body scanners and photographed naked before being allowed to board an airplane, would have seemed outrageous. Yet here we are. What might be next? The stubborn truth is, we can turn airports into fortresses if we want (in some respects we’re well along that path), yet we’ll never be entirely safe. Airport screening alone, no matter how thorough, how expensive, and how technologically advanced, will never defeat a relentless enough, resourceful enough adversary intent on downing a plane.
That isn’t capitulation, it’s reality. And acknowledging this reality would go a long way toward warding off panic and overreaction when the next successful attack occurs.
Regrettably, too, we often forget that commercial air travel has long been a target of terrorist extremists. The 1970s and 1980s in particular were, as I like to describe them, a Golden Age of Air Crimes, comparatively rife with bombings, hijackings and other deadly assaults against airplanes and airports. Over one five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks, including the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772; the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people; and the incredible saga of TWA Flight 847. And let’s not forget what might have been, such as the so-called “Project Bojinka,” the 1994 scheme masterminded by Ramzi Yousef (nephew of Kalid Sheikh Mohammad), in which impossible-to-detect (at the time) liquid explosives were to be used to simultaneously destroy a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately the plot unraveled and Yousef was arrested.
While we can argue, quite persuasively, that many of the current-day security measures have done little if anything to make us safer, we’ve nevertheless introduced measures that have been useful and effective, from explosives screening of checked luggage to the sorts of trans-border partnerships that broke up the most recent plot from Yemen. Whether in spite of, or because of, the attention we’ve lavished on All Things Terrorism, the past decade has seen fewer attacks against commercial air travel than any since the 1950s.What we need to remember, though, is that our success has had more to do with the security measures we don’t see than those taking place in plain view. And if our luck is to hold, we need to better rationalize and streamline our entire approach to airport security. For instance, if we’re going to have those body scanners, let’s put them where they’re needed. If this requires negotiating with foreign authorities whose airports are beyond TSA’s jurisdiction, so be it. Meanwhile, here at home, TSA’s one-size-fits-all approach, in which every single person who flies is seen as a potential threat, is simply unsustainable in a country where close to 2 million people fly daily. Things like taking snow globes from children, haggling over tiny container sizes, or confiscating a dessert fork from a uniformed, on-duty airline pilot (it happened to me) serve no useful purpose whatsoever. On the contrary, they divert valuable time and resources away from the things that could make us safer. Let’s scale back that concourse Kabuki and retrain guards in the finer points of a more sensible, risk-based assessment of passengers and their belongings.
And lastly, if only as an aside, let’s behold for a moment the term “underwear bomb.” That was the operative phrase in literally hundreds of articles and broadcasts over the past several days, and nowhere did it raise a snicker. What does it say about our country, I wonder, that such a preposterous expression is instantly understood and effectively taken for granted?
Strange times indeed.
After a Navy SEAL team killed Osama bin Laden at his Pakistan hideout a year ago this week, it flew his body to the Arabian Sea, weighted it down, and slid it silently off an aircraft carrier into the watery depths.
For many Americans, the secret raid provided a measure of revenge and catharsis for the strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. But it didn’t provide the kind of justice and official reckoning that the country needs to gain real closure. Now the government has a chance to achieve that through a full, fair and open trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants, so the world can finally see the evidence against him as the true architect of the attacks on New York and Washington. The trial kickoff — an arraignment for the men — is scheduled for this Saturday at the U.S.-run detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
This should be our Nuremburg, the defining trial of the 9/11 era and a fitting coda to it.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to be on the verge of squandering this opportunity, and with it, the best, and perhaps only, chance for the public to understand not only how the attacks came to be, but why Mohammed waged a relentless war against America and how we might stop the next would-be terrorist mastermind.
The problems lie within the reformed military-tribunal system that the Obama administration put in place after losing its fight for a civilian trial in New York. Political compromises have resulted in a flawed military commissions process that from outward appearances is not only rigged against the defense, but hyper-choreographed, censored and hermetically sealed.
“The process is designed to achieve a conviction, and to do it with as little revelation as humanly possible, but with the veneer of due process and justice,’’ said one participant who said restrictive gag orders prohibited him from talking publicly. “You’re talking about the most heinous crime ever, and we’re going to afford them less due process, less discovery, less of everything than we would the guy who shoplifted a pack of gum from CVS.’’
Obama administration officials say their reformed military commissions system is a vast improvement over the Bush administration’s version, which Obama moved to shut down on his first day in office in 2009.
Defense lawyers disagree, and insist they have been hamstrung in their efforts to mount the kind of aggressive defense needed to do their jobs including full and unfettered access to evidence, witnesses and even the accused themselves.
Four of the five legal teams had so few of their key players in place in recent months that they did not file the “mitigation submissions’’ that the government said it needed to decide which of the five men should face the death penalty and other key issues, such as whether to try them together or individually. They recently filed motions asking that the charges be thrown out because of fatal flaws in the system, which they say make it impossible for them to defend their clients.
“It’s window dressing,’’ Mohammed’s defense lawyer, David Nevin, said of the government’s improvements. “I am not all satisfied that it is a fair process. In fact, it is not a fair process.’’
Many of the defense lawyers have quit out of frustration or for other personal reasons stemming from the many delays in the process. Only a few have been there long enough to even begin to understand their clients’ case, not to mention the convoluted military commission process.
And they say they will be unable to effectively challenge confessions obtained when their clients were coercively interrogated in the CIA’s black site prisons, if they can broach the subject at all. This is important for the four men accused of helping Mohammed with the logistics of the plot. Several claim they have been wrongly accused, tortured into confessing, or both.
It is also important with regard to Mohammed, who confessed to dozens of plots while being waterboarded 183 times, and has said he may plead guilty even before the trial begins. Few U.S. counterterrorism officials believe all of his often boastful confessions, and it is important for the public to hear what, exactly, evidence the government has with regard to what he did and didn’t do, and whom he might have been protecting.
The team of Defense and Justice Department officials overseeing the military commission process, and the presiding judge, should quickly address the defense lawyers’ complaints, or a proceeding that some call “The Trial of the Century’’ will be delayed further by legal wrangling — and forever tainted by accusations of being unfair.
A full, fair and transparent trial, above all, will benefit the public. There is much the public doesn’t know about Mohammed, including the details of how he devised the plot, convinced bin Laden to let him do it and then orchestrated it “from A to Z,’’ to use his own words. It was Mohammed who masterminded dozens of other plots and attacks, some while staying a step ahead of the largest-ever criminal manhunt.
Mohammed, not bin Laden, was the one who traveled the world as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed’’ of terrorism, establishing alliances and creating a network of cells and lieutenants that in some cases remains today. And it was Mohammed who personally recruited young jihadist prospects much like a baseball scout, many of them Westerners, tapping into their grievances to turn them to his cause.
The U.S. government has kept the details of what Mohammed did — and how and why he did it — hidden in its most classified files since his capture in Pakistan nine years ago. The government should set the record straight on that, because there is an important lesson to be learned from the largely untold tale of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: It isn’t some monolithic group like al-Qaida that poses a continuing threat, it’s the one intelligent and energetic person who can emerge from nowhere and orchestrate a 9/11 while the world focuses elsewhere.
To that end, the government should declassify as much evidence as possible, and explain how it obtained it. It should call numerous witnesses to testify, especially since the one who has been publicly identified, Majid Khan, claims he was tortured while in CIA custody overseas.
Instead of limiting access to a few closed-circuit TVs, it should consider televising the proceedings. It should ensure that censorship is minimized, and used only to protect intelligence sources and methods, not to save the government from embarrassment. And it should let Mohammed and the others testify at length on their behalf if they so desire.
By doing so, the Obama administration will be able to say it did its best to put on the kind of civilian trial it has wanted all along, and one with a similar outcome to that of the al Qaida members charged with blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
Those of us who witnessed that trial in Manhattan in 2001 saw the defendants squirm in their chairs as prosecutors introduced mountains of evidence against them. We saw eyewitnesses point the finger at the accused, and surviving victims glare at them from the pews.
We heard from the terrorists themselves, and learned a lot about why they did it, about how terrorist networks operate and about what might be done to stop people like them. And when the jury convicted them, there was no question that justice was done.
Happy May Day, fellow travelers! If you’re not currently disrupting capitalism and/or having your wrists zip-tied for exercising your right to freely assemble, you probably read about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s latest, not-at-all suspiciously timed terror sting. The Bureau, in an inspired bit of early-20th century nostalgia, has railroaded a bunch of dangerous anarchists. (Or “dangerous” “anarchists.”) America will not waver in the face of the Galleanist threat!
Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)
The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.
In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.
(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)
(Credit: Reuters/Frank Polich) 
(Credit: http://tmiyakawadesign.com/) 
Travelers line up at a TSA checkpoint at Los Angeles International Airport.
(Credit: Reuters/Danny Moloshok) 
(Credit: Reuters//Brennan Linsley) 
U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach, left, and FBI special agent in charge Stephen Anthony walk past a map showing the location of a bridge on Ohio Rt. 82. Five men, pictured on the wall behind the map, have been arrested for conspiring to blow up the bridge. (Credit: AP/Mark Duncan) 
