American Airlines Flight 970 was supposed to be routine, a two-hour hop from Managua, Nicaragua, to Miami International Airport. The only thing different about the scheduled flight leaving from Augusto Cesar Sandino International Airport on March 31, 1993, was that it was carrying senior-level Nicaraguan diplomats. Just before the plane was to take off, airport authorities received an anonymous telephone call threatening to shoot down the Boeing 727 with a shoulder-launched missile.
The plane was kept on the ground until security crews could sweep the area by foot and helicopter for any suspicious activity. The authorities had plenty of reason for concern — the caller had said the plane would be shot down with a “Redeye” missile. Redeyes, the first American-made, shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, had been captured by the Russians at the end of the Vietnam War and subsequently shipped to the Cubans, who then funneled them to Nicaragua’s communist Sandinista regime.
In the end, the flight took off without incident, but the incident unnerved airport authorities and American Airlines, who realized that they were virtually powerless against the invisible threat. It also showed how close to home the threat of shoulder-launched missile attacks against passenger jets has come.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, aviation experts warn that shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles could be used against American passenger jets in the future. Terrorist organizations like Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network are already believed to own such missiles, and some say it will only be a matter of time before they filter into the U.S. — if they haven’t already.
So-called Man-Portable Air Defense Systems, or MANPADS, are capable of knocking a jet out of the sky from as far as five miles away and at an altitude of up to 13,000 feet in as little as 13 seconds. Those aboard often have no warning before the missile explodes as it slams into an engine, air-conditioning unit or other heat-producing device on the aircraft.
In addition to American-made Stingers — currently in the news because hundreds were supplied by the U.S. to the mujahedin fighters in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979 — there are also Russian versions of the technology, including the Strela and IGLA series missiles. Highly accurate, easy to use and conceal, they are readily available on the black market around the world.
According to a 1997 CIA report, shoulder-launched missiles were used 27 times against civilian aircraft in the last 19 years, resulting in 400 casualties. A 1994 State Department report offers a slightly higher figure — 536 fatalities of passengers and crew as a result of 25 civilian aircraft incidents involving MANPAD missile attacks. A Department of Defense report released in 2000 goes a step farther, stating that “one of the leading causes of loss of life in commercial aviation worldwide has been from MANPADS attacks, with over 30 aircraft lost.”
Most of the incidents have been concentrated in Africa and the former republics of the Soviet Union, but there have also been attacks in Near East Asia and Central America.
The prospect of a domestic antiaircraft missile attack has captivated American minds for several years now. Speculation that a Stinger was behind the explosion that downed TWA Flight 800 was so great that the Pentagon even launched several of the missiles off the coast of Florida during the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the crash in order to disprove those theories.
The threat to commercial aviation first emerged in 1973, when Italian police arrested five Palestinian terrorists armed with antiaircraft missiles as they waited to shoot down an El-Al plane in Rome. But the first actual launching of a MANPAD missile at a commercial aircraft came in November, 1975, in the skies above Angola, according to a report published by the Pentagon’s Joint Technical Coordinating Group on Aircraft Survivability.
Among the most widely publicized incidents involving commercial aircraft were the downings of two Rhodesian Airlines flights in 1978 and 1979 over what is now Zimbabwe, using Russian SA-7 missiles. The attacks resulted in the deaths of at least 111 passengers and crew.
In 1993, according to the State Department, a TU-154 aircraft in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia carrying 100 passengers, including a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, made a crash landing at the airport in Sukhumi after being struck in midair by a heat-seeking MANPADS missile. Only 26 of the passengers were able to escape before the plane exploded into flames on the runway, killing everyone left on board.
In the decades since the missiles first emerged, various government agencies have become increasingly alarmed by the threat they pose.
Gary Stubblefield, who heads the security firm Vantage Security and has testified before Congress about the threat of terrorism, describes the shoulder-fired missiles as “aviation’s dirty little secret.”
In April, Air Force Gen. Charles T. Robertson Jr., the commander in charge of the military’s “heavy lift” services, responsible for transporting troops and weaponry to hotspots around the world, told a Senate subcommittee that MANPADS “are the most serious threat to our large and slow-flying air mobility aircraft. These systems are lethal, affordable, easy to use, and difficult to track and counter.”
Robertson has good reason for worry. Despite the fact that some military planes carry sophisticated sensors to detect a MANPADS attack, and can deploy countermeasures to help defend against them, 12 of the 29 aircraft lost during the Gulf War were lost to MANPADS attacks, a recent RAND Institute study noted. Civilian aircraft are virtually defenseless in the face of an antiaircraft missile attack.
Although loath to discuss this threat publicly, officials in a variety of federal agencies have been aware of the danger for decades.
“Probably my greatest concern, every day, is the threat posed by the increasing global proliferation of man-portable air defense systems or MANPADS,” Gen. Robertson told the Senate Armed Forces Committee last May. “We know that MANPADS are available and are likely in the hands of our terrorist adversaries.”
Both the State Department and the Congressional Research Service have drawn the same conclusion. In remarks before the International Rescue Committee in 1998, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned, “We are also pressing to conclude an agreement to control the export of shoulder-fired missiles, which too many terrorist groups, criminal syndicates and narco-trafficking organizations possess.” In a 1999 report to Congress, the Congressional Research Service offered what is perhaps the most ominous missive yet — that it is “highly likely” that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terror network have acquired MANPADS.
If so, bin Laden and al-Qaida wouldn’t be alone. At least 27 guerrilla and terrorist groups already have access to MANPADS, a recent report in Jane’s Defense Review alleged. “It is logical to assume that bin Laden’s al-Qaida network is in possession of additional MANPADS. If this is true, then al-Qaida represents the most significant threat to international civil aviation. Given bin Laden’s specific threats against U.S. citizens, this threat is especially relevant with regard to U.S.-owned airlines,” the Jane’s report concluded.
Others believe attacks on American carriers would most likely happen abroad. “Given the porosity of our borders, it is possible for such weapons to be smuggled into the U.S.,” says William Hoehn Jr., a terrorism expert and professor of international affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “But I would guess that the greater MANPADS danger to U.S. civil aviation is still from takeoffs and landings overseas.”
Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown acknowledges the weapons’ viable threat to civil aviation, noting that the FAA has “clearly considered it.” Brown says the FAA established a special task force on MANPADS. The interagency group — which included representatives of the Department of Defense, the FAA and the intelligence community — issued a classified report in 1998. Since that time, despite the government’s concerns about antiaircraft missiles, no major changes have been made to either commercial aircraft design or in-flight operations to reduce the risk to travelers from a terrorist intent on shooting down a jet.
Steps can be taken to make commercial aircraft less vulnerable to MANPADS. Gulfstream Aviation, a manufacturer of corporate jets, already offers an infrared countermeasures (IRCM) package as an option on its aircraft. Other measures that can be taken include attaching flare dispensers, installing “sacrificial” nozzles onto engines, locating infrared sources in less vulnerable areas of the aircraft, keeping flight control hydraulics away from likely hit locations, separating fuel systems from likely hit locations and hardening or shielding critical components around infrared sources.
During a classified briefing in 1999, FAA official Raymond Schillinger described the government’s research into identifying aircraft and airport vulnerabilities. A subsequent report released by the National Defense Industrial Association, a organization representing major defense corporations, described Schillinger’s briefing as “a sobering presentation that described FAA studies regarding the MANPADS threat to commercial and transport aircraft.”
The report also noted that “the FAA’s research and experimentation indicate a definite need to reduce vulnerability to MANPADS. The small size and portability of these missiles make them a lethal threat, especially in takeoff and landing corridors. Since there have been no confirmed incidents in the U.S., it is difficult to convince aircraft manufacturers and airline companies of the potential cost benefits to making the aircraft less susceptible and less vulnerable to MANPADS …”
How vulnerable does that leave America’s airlines? “If terrorists [in the U.S.] had them, they could use them against buildings, airliners, etc.,” warns Ivan Eland, a terrorism expert at the Cato Institute’s Defense Policy Studies program. “There is very little the authorities could do about it.”
Dr. Todd Curtis, creator of AirSafe.com and a former Air Force officer and Boeing safety analyst, cautions that if there were a “dedicated person (who) wanted to shoot down a plane, there’s nothing to stop them.”
A handful of major American airliners contacted multiple times during the reporting of this article — including United, Northwest, Continental, Southwest and others — refused comment when asked by this reporter about the vulnerability of commercial airliners to missile attacks. Numerous calls to the Airline Pilots Association went unreturned.
Peter Foster, spokesman for the Air Canada Pilots Association, was less reserved. The danger of a MANPADS attack, he says, is “a constant threat to the air system, no doubt about it.” Foster also stated that this danger “has not been considered in (commercial) aircraft design.”
MANPADS missile systems first gained widespread fame in the war between Afghanistan and the former Soviet Union. During that conflict, Soviet forces were running roughshod over Afghan defenders until the United States began supplying the anti-Soviet mujahedin with Stinger missiles. These MANPADS have been credited with turning the tide in that conflict against the Russians. Of the more than 900 stingers supplied to the mujahedin, many were never fired and remain in the arsenals of various groups in Afghanistan, despite a reported $55 million CIA effort to retrieve them.
Many of the Stingers have fallen into the hands of the Taliban, which has long been secreting bin Laden. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers last month estimated that the Taliban possesses between 200 and 300 MANPADS.
The security threat is not limited to regions where MANPADS are traded on the black market. They also represent a possible danger inside the U.S. After undertaking a comprehensive inspection of U.S. military storage depots, the General Accounting Office concluded that inventory control of military MANPADS stockpiles is so poor that hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of the weapons are unaccounted for.
The GAO report raised another serious question about the safeguarding of America’s Stinger stockpile. During the Gulf War, citizens of other countries were involved in the transport of U.S. Stingers on unguarded trucks. One Army official quoted by the GAO said that it would be “pure luck” if none of the missiles were lost. “Lax military oversight (has left) these missiles, which are in demand by terrorists and drug dealers, vulnerable to threat,” the GAO concluded in its report.
In addition to the U.S.-supplied Stingers in Afghanistan, newer and more sophisticated MANPADS are now being produced by former Warsaw Pact nations. All kinds of MANPADS have been flowing into the world’s underground arms markets, where their black market cost is under $100,000 — well within the reach of many deep-pocketed terrorist groups.
In the mid-1990s, the U.S. became so concerned with the proliferation of MANPADS that it lobbied hard for the adoption of global export controls. As a result of the campaign, the U.S. and other countries adopted the Wassenaar Arrangement. Though it does not restrict the sale of MANPADS, Wassenaar does promote the “transparency” of arms sales as a way to curb inappropriate transfers of weapons.
“We put the lid on the box, but before we did, a lot of them (MANPADS) got out of the box,” a State Department official who asked not to be named concedes.
But Wassenaar’s greatest weakness lies in its inability to thwart black-market sales. “Many countries besides the U.S. have manufactured MANPADS, including Russia (from former Soviet designs), France, Germany, the U.K. and others,” says Georgia Tech’s Hoehn. “The former Soviet Union sold them widely to most of its client states, including Iran and Iraq — as we did to our allies and to the Afghan rebels. I suspect they are almost as readily available on the ‘secondary arms markets’ as land mines, only more expensive,” he says.
Even if MANPADS are only sold to legitimate governments with the intention of their being used for self-defense, there is no guarantee that they will remain secure. In 1998, soldiers in the former Soviet republic of Georgia staged an uprising against the government of Eduard Shevardnadze and seized a cache of the shoulder-fired missiles. Whether by stealth or force of arms, if one is determined to obtain the missiles, they are available — and they are small enough for a terrorist to easily smuggle into any country, including the United States.
We’ve already had close calls.
Federal law enforcement agencies have recently arrested a handful of people trying to smuggle MANPADS in and out of the United States in high-profile cases. Two of the most recent events occurred near Miami. In 1997, a group of smugglers from the former Soviet Union was arrested for attempting to ship a load of MANPADS into the U.S. from Bulgaria. When federal agents arrested the men in Florida, fortunately, the missiles were still in Bulgaria.
More recently, on June 12, federal officials arrested two men in an arms deal sting operation — an Egyptian and a Pakistani, both from New Jersey — in a warehouse in West Palm Beach, Fla., on charges that they intended to export a wide variety of sophisticated weaponry, including American-made Stingers. The day of their arrest, the two suspects inspected a MANPADS missile at the warehouse and allegedly expressed interest in selling missiles to a foreign country. Later, an attorney for the Egyptian man at the center of the case, Diaa Mohsen, quoted in the Palm Beach Post, said the weapons would most likely have gone to the Republic of Congo or Pakistan.
Although law enforcement officials have had success in stopping the import of MANPADS into the U.S., it may only be a matter of time before terrorists outsmart officials. A recent Rand Institute study suggested that if terrorists took their cue from drug smugglers along the porous U.S. border, the future could be grim.
“Hundreds of thousands of people cross the U.S. border illegally every year, and individual drug shipments into the country are often as large as tens of tons,” said the Rand study. “There is no reason to believe that a sufficiently motivated adversary could not duplicate the accomplishments of immigrants and drug smugglers. Indeed, a nation or terrorist group might hire smugglers for their expertise.” In theory, they could smuggle weapons as easily as the tons of cocaine they bring in every year.
When asked about the potential threat of smuggling identified in the Rand report, U.S. Customs Service spokesman Kevin Bell conceded: “More (drugs) get in than we can guess, and I would think that would be the same situation [with respect to MANPADS].”
The White House, meanwhile, recently ushered a major package of security measures through Congress. But President Bush’s own spokespeople admit that those measures will not eliminate the risk posed by MANPADS to air travelers. When asked by Salon what steps the White House is taking to reduce the threat of missile attacks, spokesman Ken Lisaius referred to comments made previously by press secretary Ari Fleischer. “Ari stated that the threat (to travelers) had been diminished, not that the situation is threat-free,” Lisaius said.
Dr. Robert Pfaltzgraff Jr., a professor of international security studies at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, warns that the threat is the logical outcome of the global proliferation of MANPADS. “We should not discount the possibility that they are in the United States and may be used,” he cautions.
“We’re in deep trouble.”
Victor Fasciani, a 40-year-old asset manager, pays membership dues to the Republican National Committee, the only party he’s ever belonged to. He was at the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia, where he was a New York delegate for John McCain. He’s no fan of John Kerry, but come November, he says, “I’m probably not voting for Bush, and I’m not voting for Ralph Nader, so that leaves me with a quandary.”
It’s a quandary afflicting many moderate Republicans, who feel alienated by their party’s rightward lurch and economic irresponsibility, and who fear that another four years of Bush will consolidate the power of the party’s most hard-line conservative elements. Even as moderate Republicans make gains in liberal states like New York and California, they’re feeling squeezed by their own party. Elements of the Republican right have declared jihad on the values party moderates hold dear, and though the White House claims to embrace all Republican factions, for most moderates there’s little doubt where its loyalties lie.
Few politicians want to admit the split, but it’s getting almost impossible to ignore. Former Bush counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, a Republican who has served four administrations — three of them Republican — slammed Bush this week for a weak response to the threat of terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks. Now he’s being savaged by fellow Republicans who have, in essence, accused him of working to aid the Democrats. McCain, the Arizona senator, along with Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, have made headlines by openly defending Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a fellow Vietnam vet, against Bush campaign charges that Kerry is weak on national defense. The White House is incensed.
McCain and Hagel insist they still support Bush for reelection. The same holds for the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group of GOP moderates that includes Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, Gov. George Pataki of New York, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California; all of them claim to avidly support the president’s reelection.
But there’s little doubt that behind the scenes, some moderate Republicans are rooting for the other side. If Bush wins, one aide to a moderate Republican says privately, “that would be the worst possible situation.”
That’s because some Republicans say that a Bush loss may be their last chance to take their party back. “If Bush were defeated by Kerry, it would certainly call into question the Republican leadership, people like Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert,” says Fasciani. “That axis of the party may lose its weight and its power. The Powell and Giuliani wing of the party would certainly gain some prominence and may, during the next four years of a Kerry administration, perhaps even gain control of the party and increase the tent.” Such hopes have even led some Republicans to found a grass-roots group called Republicans for Kerry.
It’s no wonder moderates are feeling desperate. After all, a faction within their own party is fighting to purge them — and that faction includes some of the nation’s most powerful Republicans. In 1999, right-wing operative Steve Moore founded the Club for Growth, an anti-tax lobbying group that targets moderate Republicans, which it calls RINOs, “Republicans In Name Only.” Since then, the group, which funds right-wing primary challenges against centrist incumbents as well as general election campaigns, has become one of the most powerful financial engines of the right. Its Web site boasts: “We are now #1 in funds for Republican candidates outside the Republican Party itself!”
So far, the Club has failed to defeat any of the moderates it’s set its sights on. But it plans to raise $15 million for conservative candidates this year, and it’s going after one of the pillars of GOP centrism, veteran Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, by bankrolling U.S. Rep. Patrick Toomey’s primary challenge. Specter’s defeat, Moore has said, would be a “major scalp on the wall.”
The right smells victory. On March 23, the National Review ran a story titled “The Specter of Defeat — Pennsylvania polls look promising for Toomey.” Specter is still ahead, but polls show that his once commanding lead has shrunk — a recent poll by KDKA-TV Pittsburgh/WNEP-TV Scranton/Survey USA had him only nine points ahead of his challenger.
The primary contest is shaping up to be a referendum on the party’s future. According to a March 1 Wall Street Journal article, “Rep. Toomey is testing the strength of what appears to be a growing fault line in the Republican Party this year, between ideologically pure but increasingly disgruntled conservatives and established, but more moderate, figures such as Sen. Specter. The April 27 Senate primary here will see the only major intraparty fight this election year, and is being closely watched as an indication of how deep conservative sentiment is running. ‘It’s the best battle for the soul of the GOP this year,’ says Toomey consultant Keith Appell, referring to the name Grand Old Party.”
It’s hard to tell whose side the president is on. Karl Rove has reportedly repudiated the club for sowing discord in the party during the primaries, but Bush has undercut Specter on issues like overtime rules, an important one in an industrial state like Pennsylvania. “U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao has denied a public request from Pennsylvania’s senior senator to delay loosening the nation’s overtime rules,” said a Jan. 21 story in the Washington Times. Several paragraphs later, it continued: “Specter, facing a re-election fight against conservative Rep. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., scheduled the hearing so the topic could get a ‘full airing.’ Besides asking Chao for the delay, Specter also asked her to remain in the hearing room for subsequent discussions.” She refused.
Even as Bush holds himself somewhat aloof, other members of the Republican leadership have actively embraced the Club for Growth. In 2002, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, then House Majority Whip, gave $50,000 to the club through his political action committee, enraging party moderates.
More than anyone else, DeLay is a symbol of what moderates hate about the direction their party is going in, and he revels in displaying his power over his less zealous colleagues. As Nick Thompson wrote in Salon in September, DeLay has used the allocation of committee chairs to punish those who swerve even a little bit from his party line. “This is why moderate Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., who generally supports DeLay, was blocked from becoming chair of the Government Reform Committee, a move even he says he knew would be a consequence of his support for campaign-finance reform,” Thompson wrote. “Rep. Marge Roukema, R-N.J., simply left Congress after DeLay boxed her out of several positions. In several primaries, DeLay has also worked against several moderate Republicans in favor of less electable conservatives, showing that the Texan would sometimes rather lose with a conservative than win with a moderate.”
It’s not surprising that some moderates are starting to feel similarly uncompromising. After all, old-fashion establishment Republicans have made a tactical alliance with fundamentalist right-wing revolutionaries like DeLay, but few want to see his vision of America realized.
Moderate Republicans are often fiscal conservatives but social liberals — in many ways, the exact opposite of this administration. They believe in balanced budgets, environmental conservation and a foreign policy that’s strong without being needlessly belligerent. They see themselves as the heirs of former President Teddy Roosevelt, the avid conservationist and trustbuster, and former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, the philanthropist, statesman and governor of New York. The party they joined was staid and dignified. It was the other party that seemed shrill and radical.
When George Bush was elected in 2000, moderate Republicans thought he was on their side. But that illusion was dispelled in his first few months of office. “When the president was elected, everyone was looking for a breath of fresh air — Democrats and Republicans alike — for the good of the country we wanted a bipartisan effort,” Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., tells Salon. “We were all so weary of partisan trench warfare, and now it is deeper than ever.”
“The president’s agenda has been so different from his campaign rhetoric,” Chafee says. “He is pushing an extreme agenda, from the abandonment of Kyoto, to banning access to abortions for service members overseas.”
For a while, Bush’s extremism was overshadowed by Sept. 11, and some moderates continue to support Bush because of the war on terror, despite being appalled by his domestic policies. Roger White, an associate professor of political science at Loyola University and self-described Rockefeller Republican, actually gave up his party membership four or five years ago out of disgust with the dominance of cultural conservatives like DeLay. Yet he supports Bush’s foreign policy, and says, “I don’t see the main danger as coming from cultural conservatives. I see the main danger coming from international terrorists.”
But Bush has squandered much of his post-9/11 popularity by using it as cover to pass a right-wing domestic agenda. “After 9/11, Republicans could have become the majority party for the next 50 years,” says professor Alan Wolfe, the founding director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. “But for whatever reason, Bush kept up the same polarizing approach. Everyone wanted to rally behind Bush. This is the biggest act of political stupidity in my lifetime.”
Moderates, says Chafee, “could have made a huge difference to the president,” had he not abandoned them and tried to “bludgeon them into compliance.” Now, those on the receiving end of that bludgeoning must decide whether they can support an administration that doesn’t support them. Leaving the party can be a wrenching act of personal redefinition, but if Bush wins another term, there may be no hope of changing things from within.
“My decision to leave the Republican Party was deeply personal and one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made,” former Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords told Salon. The Vermont independent famously quit the party in 2001, incurring the White House’s wrath and briefly handing control of the Senate to the Democrats.
“I left the Republican Party because I feared the Bush administration and the GOP-controlled Congress was moving too far to the right, and not listening to moderate Republicans such as myself,” he says. “Much of what we have seen since then has only confirmed those fears. We are in a war that we shouldn’t be in; the wealthy get tax cuts while our schools get shortchanged; the deficit grows by the day while millions of jobs are lost here at home. Meanwhile, the White House tries to placate the far right by supporting a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, diverting the nation’s attention from where it should be focused. We are headed on the wrong course, and it troubles me deeply.”
Despite the fervent hopes of many Democrats, it’s unlikely that waves of Republican officials and voters are likely to follow Jeffords. Most Republicans continue to back their president. The moderates are a small group within the party, and it remains to be seen whether their unhappiness with Bush is a harbinger of electoral trouble for the administration in November.
“If I am talking anecdotally to moderate Republicans, it’s very hard to find one who is going to vote for Bush, very difficult,” says John Zogby, president and CEO of the polling firm Zogby International. “On the other hand, strangely enough it’s not showing up in our polling.” In fact, Zogby’s latest polls show 87 percent of Republicans backing Bush. “I’m just watching and waiting and saying to myself maybe there’s something going on here, because I’m hearing it,” he says.
So if moderates are disenchanted, why isn’t that showing up in the polls? In part, it’s because moderate Republicans as a whole are a rapidly diminishing species in most of the country. According to Zogby, 80 percent of Republicans self-identify as conservative. Asked about the role of moderates in the party, Rick Shaftan, a conservative Republican pollster in New Jersey, says: “It’s not that many individuals you’re talking about in terms of votes.”
Moderate Republicans, he says, are traditionally “mainline protestant WASPs like [former New Jersey Gov.] Christie Whitman. There aren’t that many WASPs. I don’t know where they’re a significant share of the vote.”
Those places where old-school Republicans are concentrated, on the East Coast and in California, are largely not in play in the 2004 election. Because they carry so little electoral weight, the national party has little incentive to cater to them.
The Republican Party has been moving away from its East Coast roots since the 1960s, when there was a split in the party between its liberal establishment wing — so-called Rockefeller Republicans — and the insurgent followers of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, who lost the 1964 election in a landslide, but whose conservative movement went on to take over the party.
During the 1980s, as Southern conservatives flowed into the Republican Party, coastal sophisticates were again pushed out, and in the last two decades the Southern right has continued to consolidate its power. In a 1998 essay called “The Southern Captivity of the GOP,” Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell wrote of how even non-Southern conservatives were “put off to see that ‘traditional’ values are now defined by the majority party as the values of the U-Haul-renting denizens of two-year-old churches and three-year-old shopping malls.”
Even Goldwater’s widow, Susan Goldwater Levine, recently told Salon that he “hated it that the right-wing zealots took over the party.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, right-wing populist rhetoric, with its attacks on cosmopolitans and urbanites, has alienated those who don’t like to think of themselves as Bible-thumping rubes. “I don’t like the polarization, the idea that people who don’t live on the coasts are morons who watch NASCAR and drink Budweiser all day,” says Fasciani. “It’s posturing. When it comes down to it, do they really care about Joe six-pack? I don’t buy that populist notion that they espouse.” Nor does he relate to it.
Fasciani, a native of Westchester, N.Y., is a Republican of the old school who counts Abraham Lincoln and Roosevelt among his heroes. He’s proud of the party’s tradition of environmental stewardship — it was Richard Nixon, after all, who established the Environmental Protection Agency — and the military valor shown by people like Eisenhower and McCain. The party he loves is one where strength and erudition aren’t mutually exclusive.
“Teddy Roosevelt, this man read more books than Bush could name,” says Fasciani. “He wrote 50 or a hundred books in his lifetime.” (Fasciani is being hyperbolic — Roosevelt authored a mere 36). “Then you’ve got a guy in the White House now who’s probably read one book in the last 15 years and maybe didn’t even finish it.”
But unapologetic philistinism is considered an electoral virtue in many parts of the country, and it’s practically a first principle of the contemporary right. “Every Republican candidate now has to ‘make his bones,’ to prove his good faith by declaring his unequivocal willingness to alienate the ‘elites’ of the country,” wrote Caldwell in 1998.
Bush, of course, has been superbly willing to alienate such elites — a term that, when used by the right, seems to encompass most educated people who live in coastal cities. “My values are not Mr. Bush’s,” says Susan Cosgrove, a 59-year-old lifelong Republican who owns a communications firm in Pittsburgh. “The Republican Party as I think of it — the party of Rockefeller — had a profound respect for character, and I don’t think Mr. Bush is a man of character. I think his presidency is one of cronyism and pandering to the most radical wing of the party.”
“What I see happening is a split among Republicans I know,” she says. “A lot of them are becoming as alienated as I am, and a lot of them are moving in the same direction that the president is going. It makes for interesting dinner-table discussions.”
Cosgrove isn’t ready to leave the party yet. “There’s something to be said for trying to change things from inside,” she explains. Still, she’s getting close.
“Maybe this is a lost cause. You try to change things from the inside and if you can’t, it’s time to step outside.”
Meanwhile, she plans to volunteer for Kerry in the upcoming election. “I am in ABB mode,” she says. “Anybody but Bush.”
There’s a group for people like her, though Cosgrove hadn’t heard of it. Republicans for Kerry was founded on Jan. 16 and now has about 100 members who plan to do outreach to fellow moderate Republicans during the campaign. (At least, it had 100 members until recently, when it moved to a new Web site and started its membership roster from scratch.) Among them is Peter McLaughlin, a former McCain intern in Brookfield, Conn.
A volunteer firefighter who owns a security business with 35 employees, McLaughlin has seen the administration’s failures close-up. “First responders are being underfunded at the same time that we’re promoting the importance of the war on terror,” he says. “I can tell in my town that if something happens here, we’re going to be the first ones sent and as of today we don’t have any particularly specialized equipment.”
McLaughlin’s problems with Bush are ideological as well as practical. “A conservative conserves,” he says. “Blowing out the deficit by having these ill-advised tax cuts while conducting a war is not conservative. I’m a Teddy Roosevelt conservative, which means conserving the environment. Certainly, if you look back in history that was a Republican issue, and the Bush administration is trampling all over it. I think that’s terrible for the world and for our country.”
Bush’s record has been so terrible, he says, that another term might drive him out of the party altogether.
“It would be very difficult to go through another four years of what we’ve seen in the last three-and-a-half years,” says McLaughlin. “Certainly if there were another four years beyond that, I don’t think there’s any way that I can stay in the party. But I feel like this is my home too, and I want to fight for it. I don’t want it to be taken over by this extreme group, and to feel like I have to leave my home.”
When a shoulder-launched missile was fired on Sunday from the shelter of an Iraqi date grove and blew the rear rotor off a Chinook transport helicopter, the United States suffered the single most lethal attack on its troops since the invasion of Iraq began more than six months ago. But obscured in the initial government comments and press accounts of the deadly attack was a crucial point:
The tragedy was predictable. And though it has long been known that hundreds of shoulder-fired missiles are circulating among hostile forces in Iraq and throughout the Middle East, the Bush administration and congressional leaders have done little to protect the commercial passenger jets and some military helicopters that ferry thousands of troops in and out of the war theater.
Although Chinooks used for Special Forces operations are reported to carry anti-missile technology, a U.S. Army official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Salon that the National Guard CH-47 Chinook helicopter shot down on Sunday was unprotected. The chopper was being used to ferry at least 36 troops from Fort Carson, Colorado’s, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment to the main U.S. military base in Baghdad; from there, they were to proceed to Kuwait City, where they would have boarded one of two daily commercial airliners that the Pentagon has hired to bring troops home for a two-week break from the Iraqi war zone.
Sixteen troops died and 20 were seriously injured when the helicopter exploded and crashed in flames near Fallujah, a center of loyalty to fallen dictator Saddam Hussein.
Though the U.S. troops aboard the Chinook were probably thrilled to be taking a leave from the war, their entire route home would have been vulnerable. Like the downed helicopter, the commercial jets that would have flown them out of Kuwait lack expensive anti-missile technology. These airliners have been chartered to transport nearly 500 troops per day to Frankfurt, Germany, and then on to either Baltimore, Atlanta, or Dallas/Fort Worth. Similar commercial craft are used to ferry about 90 percent of the U.S. troops that go into and out of Iraq. Critics inside and outside the U.S. military have warned for months that the big, lumbering jets are obvious targets for Iraqi insurgents who are trying to kill American troops and drive the United States out of Iraq and the Middle East.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon proposed a $25 million program to begin equipping the commercial airliners used for troop transport with advanced technology to protect them from the shoulder-fired missiles. But when the Bush administration did nothing to win approval of the measure, Republican leadership in the House of Representatives slashed the request to $3 million, far short of the sum needed to expedite wartime protection of the aircraft.
“[Sunday's] tragic events in Iraq are a reminder of the reality of the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles,” Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., told Salon. “These weapons are easy to acquire, easy to use, and have now become a weapon of choice among terrorists. Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld acknowledged as much [Sunday] morning, yet we aren’t doing enough to protect troops transported on civilian aircraft and we aren’t doing anything to protect civilians.”
In a series of stories since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Salon has disclosed that the spread of the missiles has alarmed military brass, airline security experts and some elected officials. The launchers are small, light and easy to hide; al-Qaida operatives have them, security experts say, and so do other terror organizations. Late last year, suspected Qaida terrorists fired on a charter jet filled with Israeli travelers at Mombasa, Kenya, only narrowly missing the target. Over the past 20 years, over half of all combat aircraft lost in global conflicts have been shot down by shoulder-fired missiles.
The danger from shoulder fired-missiles in the Persian Gulf region is well-known. Last year, terrorists launched an attack just outside a Saudi Arabian air base, and over the summer, Saudi officials captured a large cache of shoulder-fired missiles. From time to time, U.S. military officials have turned up buried caches of missiles in occupied Iraq. Still, despite capturing many shoulder-fired missiles, Saddam acquired so many of the portable missile systems that the Iraqi resistance is still well-armed.
“The resistance has been targeting aircraft at Baghdad Airport for several months,” says Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counter-terrorism for the CIA. “I have heard of at least 26 SAMs fired at aircraft. The routine for aircraft landing or taking off at the airport has included countermeasures against the SAMs.”
On Sunday, in the aftermath of the Chinook take-down, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the shoulder-fired missile arsenal held by the Iraqi resistance. His reply: “Enormous numbers. Enormous numbers … Oh, have to be more than hundreds. There are weapons caches all over that country. They were using schools, hospitals, mosques to hide weapons. Think of it, in Bosnia, in the last six months, they have found 40 tons of weapons in a country that we’ve occupied for six years.”
Israel, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is one of a handful of congressional experts on the missile threat who have pressed, without success, for measures to protect military and U.S. civilian aircraft from the global proliferation of shoulder-launched missiles. But he’s baffled that President Bush hasn’t done more to protect the troops. Along with Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Israel sponsored a bill to equip all commercial airliners in the U.S. with anti-missile systems — an effort that could cost up to $15 billion, by some estimates. Due in large part to administration opposition, that bill died on Capitol Hill.
As part of the debate surrounding the president’s request for $87 billion to fund the ongoing military operations and reconstruction in Iraq, Israel and Boxer tried — unsuccessfully — to obtain financing to protect the 300 commercial jets that the Pentagon most often uses to transport our military forces within the United States and overseas.
Top national security officials began meeting last year to assess and address the risk that shoulder-fired missiles pose to U.S. airliners and, by extension, to the U.S. economy. But to date, critics say, the federal government has done almost nothing to prepare for the possibility — some call it a probability — that terrorists will use shoulder-launched missiles against American commercial jetliners, either within or outside the United States.
When the Bush administration this year allowed the much more modest $25 million measure to protect troop-transport craft to wither, some military officials were outraged. Though Bush portrays himself as a firm ally of men and women on the front lines, the critics said, he was leaving them vulnerable. “I am appalled,” one Defense Department official told Salon earlier this year, asking to remain anonymous. “We are setting ourselves up for a fall. We are paying lip-service to force protection and instead are digging a deeper hole in which to bury our head.”
Even as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made headlines this week by announcing that up to 20,000 fresh troops may be called to Iraq, President Bush and members of the congressional leadership were quietly abandoning a plan to protect troop-transport airliners from missile attack by terrorists or Saddam loyalists.
The measure, first advanced by the Pentagon, would have begun an ambitious program to equip the commercial airliners that are used for troop transport with advanced technology to protect them from the shoulder-fired missiles. Confused by disarray in the administration’s plans to protect airliners from missile attack, the House of Representatives slashed the original $25 million request to $3 million. Congressional officials say the Bush administration did nothing to win approval of the full measure — despite recent missile attacks on U.S. military craft flying near the Baghdad airport.
The outcome shocked many in the Defense Department and, critics said, it clearly could leave troops vulnerable. “I am appalled,” said one Defense Department official who asked to remain anonymous. “We are setting ourselves up for a fall. We are paying lip-service to force protection and instead are digging a deeper hole in which to bury our head.”
The $25 million measure was approved by the U.S. Senate, but slashed to $3 million in the powerful House Appropriations Committee, chaired by U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young, a Florida Republican. The lower sum, part of the proposed $400 billion defense budget for 2004, was approved in negotiations between the two chambers and is all but certain to be in the budget sent for approval to the president.
No president in recent memory has been a fiercer ally of men and women in uniform. “We will not cut corners when it comes to the defense of our great land,” Bush said last year. Even Ronald Reagan, one of the most forceful proponents of a strong military ever to inhabit the White House, never donned a flight suit and flew onto the deck of an aircraft carrier aboard a Navy plane. But this week, officials said, the Bush administration offered no support to protect the troop-transport planes.
“The administration never made the case for why it needed the money,” said John Scofield, a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee. “It was never clear what they were going to do with the money.” An aide to a Republican senator, who asked to remain anonymous, said the full funding would have been approved if Bush had pressed for it. “If the president says that something is important, he will get the funding from this Congress,” the aide said. “All he has to do is ask.”
In a series of stories since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Salon has disclosed that the proliferation of shoulder-launched missiles has alarmed airline security officials and many congressional officials. The launchers are small, light and easy to hide, and they are known to be in the hands of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. Late last year, suspected al-Qaida terrorists fired on a charter jet filled with Israeli travelers at Mombassa, Kenya, but the missile narrowly missed its target. Top national security officials began meeting last year to assess and address the risk, and some have suggested it would cost around $15 billion to equip 5,000 U.S. jetliners with anti-missile technology. But to date, critics say, the federal government has done almost nothing to prepare for the possibility — some call it a probability — that terrorists will use shoulder-launched missiles against American commercial jetliners, either within or outside the United States.
Contrary to the images portrayed in movies, most combat troops and other military personnel do not cram into the back of military transport planes when deploying around the world. Like the rest of us, they usually fly in commercial jets both within the United States and abroad.
Through the Civilian Reserve Aviation Fleet program, the Defense Department contracts with commercial airlines to provide jets and air crews during times of crisis. In return for participating in the program, airlines are guaranteed peacetime business with the Defense Department. The reserve aviation fleet “forms the majority of the DoD’s passenger airlift capability,” according to Navy Capt. Stephen Honda, spokesman for the Pentagon unit responsible for airlifting military personnel and equipment. By some estimates, over 90 percent of the military personnel moved by the Defense Department are transported on aircraft operated by CRAF carriers. And like every other commercial airliner in this country, these airliners are completely unprotected from the threat from shoulder-fired missiles.
But military craft flying in and out of Baghdad have been targeted at least three times since May by anti-U.S. forces with shoulder-launched missiles. All of those aircraft likely had sophisticated anti-missile countermeasures, and all of the shots missed their targets. Still, the threat of shoulder-fired missiles remains so great in Iraq that the Baghdad airport has remained closed to all but essential military and aid aircraft. That is the risk facing the planes that would ferry up to 20,000 reserves and National Guard troops to the Iraqi capital if Rumsfeld goes ahead with the call-up.
Pentagon documents show that shoulder-fired missiles are the single greatest killer of military aircraft, accounting for well over 50 percent of all combat losses in recent decades. Additionally, Pentagon documents show that these missiles have successfully hit 41 civilian aircraft and destroyed at least 30 of these. In the process, about 1,000 passengers and crew have been lost. Air Force Gen. John W. Handy, head of the U.S. Transportation Command, recently said that the danger posed by shoulder-fired missiles “is perhaps the greatest threat that we face anywhere in the world, and the proliferation of MANPADS is well documented.”
Some in Congress are deeply concerned about the elimination of funding to begin protecting the troop-transport aircraft. U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, a New York Democrat and outspoken proponent of federal spending to protect commercial jetliners, blasted the Bush administration in an interview this week for failing to take care of troop-transport planes. “Out of a $400 billion defense budget, $3 million is completely inadequate, particularly against thousands of shoulder-fired missiles in the hands of terrorists including al-Qaida,” Israel said. “We have simply got to stop shortchanging this glaring threat to American airplanes.”
According to Pentagon budget documents obtained by Salon, the missile defense program for aircraft in the military reserve program would have leapfrogged the lethargic anti-missile efforts currently gearing up at the Department of Homeland Security. In its first year, the Defense Department program would have measured the “heat signatures” of the commercial airliners used to transport troops, and then begun devising anti-missile measures to protect those planes. Measuring the heat signatures is a critical step, since shoulder-fired missiles are “heat seekers” and home in on the infrared radiation given off by aircraft. Currently, the DHS has no plans to conduct similar measurement efforts.
With $3 million, defense officials will be able to record those heat signatures, but little work on missile-jamming equipment will be possible unless money can be found elsewhere in the Pentagon budget.
Should terrorists begin targeting the troop-transport aircraft, there likely will be widespread political and economic effects. “The ability to rapidly deploy military force across the globe is a key element of American power and influence in the world and helps to create the stability and security that is the basis for investment and trade on which the prosperity of the U.S. and others depend,” says James Bodner, former undersecretary of defense in the Clinton administration.
A research study currently underway at the RAND Institute estimates that the direct cost of one plane’s being shot down – for the loss of life and the cost of the aircraft — would be $1 billion. The ripple effect of such a loss would likely be enormous, as people reassess the wisdom of traveling by air.
The military has taken a multi-pronged approach to protecting its combat jets and the Air Force’s large transport aircraft. It uses intelligence to uncover threats, conducts missions to capture shoulder-fired missiles from terrorists and other groups, and has installed sophisticated systems on its aircraft to jam attacking missiles and direct them away from the targeted aircraft. As a backup, since no electronic countermeasures system is 100 percent effective, the military also designs its aircraft to be able to withstand the detonation of a shoulder-fired missile warhead.
Shortly after the failed missile attack in Kenya last year, the administration formed an interagency task force to seek solutions to the shoulder-fired missile threat. Soon, however, that effort was being criticized for focusing on window-dressing solutions that cost little — and provide little protection. Confronted by congressional pressure, the administration pledged to put together a plan for combating terrorist missile attacks.
In March, Transportation Security Administration head Adm. James Loy seemed to call for an expedited push to address the threat. Speaking to CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” he said, “I think the right thing for us to do is to continue the methodical study process that has been undertaken by the National Security Council, not with years of study to come but with weeks of study to come.” Still, the administration failed to act. During congressional deliberations leading up to the vote to fund ongoing operations in Iraq, Congress ordered the Department of Homeland Security to come up with a plan to counter the threat from shoulder-fired missiles.
The department delivered a report in May that proposed spending $2 million this year to set up an administrative office to coordinate the anti-missile activities and up to $60 million next year. The White House, however, failed to seek any funding to implement the plan. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security began a much-hyped program that was supposed to have identified one or two promising technologies before the end of this month. Instead, the program petered out. In recent days a department official told Salon that the program “was never going to solve the problem [because] it lacked the necessary funding.” Still, despite the department’s dismal track record on this issue, the official insisted that a new Homeland Security program — funded in the first year with $60 million that the Congress appropriated after the White House failed to request any funding at all to address the threat — will begin the process of finding a solution. In early October, the Homeland Security officials will brief defense contractors on its goals and requirements for a missile countermeasures system for use on commercial airliners. But the program won’t yield significant progress before 2006.
“We’re heading out on a long, slow jog, when a faster pace is warranted,” says Israel. “I am convinced that the threat of shoulder-fired missiles to our commercial airplanes is serious enough to merit significantly more energy and resources.”
In the meantime, U.S. troops are being transported around the globe on aircraft that are unable to ward off a missile attack and have not been designed to take a missile hit. For the families of the troops about to be called up and sent to Iraq, this must be a chilling proposition.
When British arms dealer Hemant Lakhani was arrested a week ago and charged with plotting to sell portable missiles to terrorists who would turn them against commercial jets, the Bush administration portrayed the bust as a milestone in the war on terrorism. Top administration officials went before the reporters and, in solemn tones, described the catastrophe that might’ve been if not for the alert work of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agents. Bush himself offered a similar view when he met with reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
“The fact that we’re able to sting this guy,” the president said, “is a pretty good example of what we’re doing in order to protect the American people.”
Within days, however, a more critical view began to emerge among top national-security experts: The arrest of Lakhani and two alleged accomplices was welcome, yes, but its significance was being dramatically overstated by an administration on the defensive over its failure to capture Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and its struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq. By the critics’ line of reasoning, the administration was exaggerating the significance of the Lakhani arrest just as it had the arrests last year of alleged “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla and the Lackawanna Six “sleeper cell” in New York. While officials were tipping off reporters in advance of the bust, they complained, the administration was continuing to resist substantive — and expensive — measures to protect commercial jets.
A terrorist who wants a shoulder-fired missile is not going to go to someone like Lakhani to buy one, says Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counter-terrorism for the CIA. “This was not a terrorist incident,” he told Salon. “It did not involve the penetration of a plot or terrorist cell.” He added: “This was a truly ludicrous situation … hyped in advance by a Justice Department anxious to show success.”
“This is not a huge victory in the War on Terror,” agrees Charles Peña, director of defense policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “This just shows that we can sting a guy, not a bad thing, but it does not make it harder for al-Qaida or other terrorists to get these weapons.”
Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council director for European affairs in the Clinton administration and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, offers a blunt assessment of the arrest: “All hype.” Daalder praises the Bush administration’s success in toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan and killing or arresting numerous top al-Qaida leaders overseas, but he sees the administration’s domestic approach as flawed.
“The administration has made homeland security a political issue. The president consistently uses terror for political gain,” he says. “[U.S. Attorney General] John Ashcroft’s Justice Department is all about hype and not reality.”
Reports from the Department of Defense and other government agencies show that shoulder-fired missiles have hit at least 43 civil aircraft since the 1970s. Of these, 30 aircraft — 69 percent of the total — were shot down, leaving more than 900 air travelers dead. In an investigative report last year, Salon found that dozens of countries have produced hundreds of thousands of the shoulder-launched missiles, and that many of them have found their way to the black market. Jane’s Intelligence Review reported in 2001 that the missiles are already in the hands of up to 27 terrorist groups.
And it seems certain that al-Qaida is among them. A Pentagon spokesman told Salon last year that U.S. forces in Afghanistan had captured 5,592 shoulder-fired missiles during operations to destroy al-Qaida. The terrorist group is widely believed responsible for a missile attack on an Israeli passenger jet in Kenya last November — a case in which the missiles narrowly missed their target.
Lakhani, born in India but now a British citizen, was arrested last week at a hotel in Newark, N.J., and charged with offering to sell a sophisticated Russian SA-18 Igla missile to a man posing as a liaison to terrorists. Reports said that the suspect had first come onto intelligence radars last year when he began inquiring about the purchase of weapons on the Russian black market. Russian, British and American undercover agents then staged an elaborate setup, first selling an inoperative missile launcher and then busting him in Newark when he tried to sell it to a government informant posing a middleman for a Somalian terror group with ties to al-Qaida.
“Make one explosion … to shake the economy,” Lakhani allegedly told the buyer.
Obviously, analysts said, such an arrest may have saved lives, and it was a justified law enforcement effort to take a potentially dangerous group of arms traders out of commission. “”The president has made clear we are in an ongoing war against terrorism,” said Christopher Christie, U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey, said after the arrest. “Today the good guys won a battle in that war.”
Ashcroft was even more effusive. “This investigation,” he said, “shows that all agencies of the federal government and our international allies will work together tirelessly to keep innocent people safe.”
In the 24 hours after Lakhani’s arrest, experts on terrorism and politicians from both sides of the aisle pointed out the serious threat from these deadly accurate and easily transported weapons that the military calls MANPADS, for man-portable air defense systems. But, in America, a week can be an eternity. Between the blackout of 2003 and the continuing circus surrounding the California recall election, serious discussions about how to address this long-standing and growing threat quickly fell out of sight.
But, critics say, Bush administration officials who were describing Lakhani as a major arms dealer and suggesting that he had ties to terror groups appear to have been exaggerating. And they said flatly that the arrest did little to protect the U.S. commercial aviation industry and its passengers.
For many experts and members of Congress, the Bush administration’s efforts in combating the shoulder-fired missile threat have been too little and too late; and in recent months, aviation security experts — including some military and government officials — have begun to question Bush’s commitment to solving the problem.
Among the strongest advocates of the need to move quickly to protect the nation’s airliners is U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y. “After the attacks on Sept. 11, we cracked down on security at airports, searched every bag, put military police at airports, and shut down vulnerable airports until we knew they could be protected,” he says. “We’ve protected our airports quickly, but when it comes to protecting our aircraft from shoulder-fired missiles, it is just taking too long.” Israel and a number of other members of Congress have been pressing the administration to protect America’s airliners since al-Qaida attacked an Israeli airliner just after takeoff from Mombasa, Kenya, using Russian-designed SA-7 missiles.
Shortly after the Mombasa attack, Israel joined Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in calling for $10 billion to equip commercial airliners with a new and highly effective laser system that the Air Force is beginning to install on its large, slow transport planes, the ones most similar to commercial jets. Administration opposition killed that proposal, as well as a much smaller effort initially proposed by Florida Republican John Mica, chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee. Mica’s proposal would have provided the administration with $30 million to study ways of adapting military countermeasures into less expensive models for commercial aircraft.
But leaks from the administration’s Interagency Task Force showed a preference for low-cost solutions, such as training people who live or work near airports to recognize a missile attack, regardless of whether those solutions offer any real level of protection. When pushed by Congress to take more concrete actions, the administration took two inconsistent approaches: The Department of Homeland Security decided that the solution to this threat lay in sophisticated countermeasures and the Defense Department rejected the need for countermeasures on civilian aircraft.
An aide to a key Republican House member says the administration’s failure was a function of the budget cycle, noting that the process of preparing next year’s budget began well before November’s al-Qaida attack on the Israeli airliner in Kenya. But Leon Panetta, former chief of the Office of Management and Budget and later President Clinton’s chief of staff, rejected that excuse: “That’s bull!” If addressing the shoulder-fired missile issue were truly a priority for the administration, he suggested, the White House would have sent Congress an emergency supplemental budget request — as it did to fund the war in Iraq.
“We use emergency supplementals to fund unforeseen emergencies such as wars, disasters and fighting fires,” Panetta notes. “If the administration considered [defending against shoulder-fired missiles] critical to the security of our citizens no one in Congress would question an emergency supplemental.”
Despite inattention on the part of the administration, Mica and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., recently secured a congressional commitment for $60 million for research aimed at defeating the shoulder-fired missiles. Though the budget is not yet official, and $60 million pales in the face of the estimated $10 billion to $18 billion needed address the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles, both men see this initial funding as secure. While a welcome development, Byrd laments the delay in moving forward to protect the nation’s travelers.
“With such agreement, I expect that the work finally will get underway,” Byrd told Salon last week. “Unfortunately, because of White House obstinance earlier this year, the work is several months behind where it should be.” Mica, the only member of Congress to hold hearings on the shoulder-fired-missile threat, told Salon that he is confident that he can move Department of Homeland Security to act “sooner rather than later.” But he stresses that he wants to make sure that “we don’t spend money on systems that won’t work.”
Adm. James Loy, chief of Bush’s Transportation Security Administration, seemed to tell CBS News’ “60 Minutes” in March that the effort to address the threat should be expedited. “I think the right thing for us to do is to continue the methodical study process that has been undertaken by the National Security Council, not with years of study to come, but with weeks of study to come.” Now, however, it looks like the first fruits of the DHS’s work will not emerge before 2006.
Until the administration’s program gets up and running, and several years of research and development yield a sufficiently inexpensive solution to the portable-missile threat, the American public must rely upon the efforts of law enforcement to protect the nation’s airliners. But even after the arrest of Lakhani, Byrd and others remain uneasy. “We cannot rely solely on law enforcement stings to protect air passengers from missile attack,” Byrd says. “We must invest in defenses to help save lives now.”
When al-Qaida terrorists in Kenya failed in their effort to shoot down an Israeli charter jet with a shoulder-launched missile last November, airline security experts were relieved, but only briefly. Such an attack had long been expected, and though the missile missed its target that day, the experts urged that the near-miss be regarded as a wakeup call to airlines and governments worldwide.
A little more than six months later, the administration of President George W. Bush is making only a limited commitment to reduce the threat of shoulder-launched missiles, and critics both inside and outside the government say he is putting both passengers and the airline industry at risk.
The administration recently blocked two congressional measures to address the threat, including a comprehensive $9 billion plan to begin outfitting passenger jets with sophisticated anti-missile equipment. Instead, a new report by Bush’s Department of Homeland Security says the administration is proposing a timetable in which the study and planning would not be completed until 2005, and the first widespread installation of anti-missile technology would be years away, at best. Only $2 million would be spent in the next few months to assemble staff and data on the risk posed by portable missiles; up to $60 million would be allocated next year to continue the study.
But the threat posed by the lightweight portable missiles — formally known as “man-portable air defense systems” — has already been demonstrated in a decade of government research. Today, the administration’s less-than-urgent approach to airline security is provoking angry attacks in Congress.
In a letter sent Thursday to Tom Ridge, Bush’s secretary of homeland security, Sen. Robert Byrd ripped the administration for its seeming nonchalance. And the West Virginia Democrat reiterated his concerns in an interview with Salon. “When it comes to fighting in distant lands, the administration’s attitude is, Spare no expense,” he said. “But when it comes to fighting the war on American soil, the administration prefers to shop in bargain basements.”
Even within the Defense Department, officials privately acknowledge that further study is not the solution to the problem. “We know what we need to do to solve the problem in commercial aircraft,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “All we need is the funding to make it happen.”
Airline security experts estimate it will cost $9 billion to $18 billion to equip the nation’s passenger fleet with “directed infrared countermeasures systems” that can deflect a missile from its course. The Department of Homeland Security report to Congress called the anti-missile systems “the most promising” technology for protecting airliners. The systems use pulses of light to jam the missiles’ guidance systems, a technology effective against the early-generation portable missiles that are most likely to be in the hands of terrorists. The most sophisticated anti-missile systems use lasers to confuse attacking missiles and are just beginning to enter service on military transport aircraft.
The cost is steep — too steep, analysts say, to be borne by U.S. airlines that are already struggling with nearly $100 billion in debt. But the cost of not making the investment could be even greater. If terrorists shot down even one commercial airliner, they could potentially paralyze traffic in the $300-billion-per-year airline industry, with shockwaves spreading throughout the U.S. economy.
In an investigative report last year, Salon detailed how the commercial jets in the United States — and the millions of passengers who fly on them — are at risk from the small, light and easily hidden missile systems. They are relatively easy to fire, and when operated properly, they can bring down a jet at altitudes as high as 10,000 feet. More advanced versions can reach aircraft traveling at over 15,000 feet.
To be sure, there are skeptics who believe that the threat of shoulder-fired missiles is overblown. Steven Brill, the former publisher of Brill’s Content and author of the new book “After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era,” derides recent congressional moves to protect airlines from them. “It’s a stupid policy initiative,” Brill told Salon on Monday. A terrorist missile attack on an airliner “could happen tomorrow,” he said, “but it is still a stupid initiative.” In Brill’s opinion, terrorists are more likely to strike at “mass transit, rail, air cargo, and office building ventilation systems.” Those, he says, are the places where the government should be spending money to avoid terrorist attacks.
But that is a minority position. Those most familiar with the danger, regardless of political stripe, agree that the missiles pose a significant, immediate threat. Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican who chairs the House aviation subcommittee, has called the risk “sobering,” and at a Washington news conference in March, he said: “We can’t afford to not act.” A Boeing official privately described the shoulder-launched missiles as “the greatest current threat to the U.S. air transport system.” Over the past year, intelligence officials have grown increasingly concerned about the likelihood that al-Qaida has smuggled the launchers into the United States. The FBI in May 2002 issued a remarkable bulletin to local and state law enforcement agencies warning that al-Qaida possessed such missiles and would likely attempt an attack inside the United States.
On Election Day last November, the Transportation Security Administration convened a secret meeting in a secure conference room in Washington to inform a group of airline CEOs of the growing threat posed by the missiles. And just days ago, the Group of Eight industrial powers meeting in Evian, France, issued a sobering message: “We reiterate our deep concern about the threat posed to civil aviation by [the portable missiles], especially in the hands of terrorists or states that harbor them.”
Although officials often cite the SA-7, the most widely proliferated and among the least capable shoulder-fired missiles, as the one terrorists are most likely to unleash against U.S. airliners, recent reports out of the Middle East indicate that Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based terrorist group with an annual budget the CIA says exceeds $200 million, has recently acquired SA-18 missiles from Syria. These super-sophisticated Russian-made missiles are far more accurate — and potentially far more lethal — than the SA-7 missiles used in the Mombasa attack last year. Should al-Qaida obtain these new-generation missiles from Hezbollah, Syria, or another willing broker, it will significantly enhance its ability to blast American airliners out of the sky.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security declined repeated requests for comment on the Bush administration’s airline security plan. The Air Transport Association, an industry group representing many of the commercial carriers, said yesterday that the federal government, and not the industry, should be responsible for such an overarching security concern.
“Defending against the threat of terrorist attacks has always been a fundamental government responsibility,” said association spokeswoman Diana Cronan. “The airline industry, having been made aware by appropriate government authorities of concerns with the potential use of shoulder-fired missiles, is doing everything within its power to assist the government in its decision making as to the proper response to these and all terrorist threats.”
In Congress, numerous U.S. officials have expressed alarm at the risk and have pressed for a commitment by the Bush administration to address it — but so far without success. In the weeks leading up to the vote on funding the Iraq war, a measure sponsored by Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., proposed spending $9 billion to install anti-missile systems on commercial airliners; the measure failed, due largely to White House hostility. Then, the administration blocked a bipartisan plan, pushed by Mica, chair of the House aviation subcommittee, to spend $30 million in the current fiscal year to begin the process of adapting military technology to commercial airliners.
Instead, according to the Department of Homeland Security report, the Bush administration has committed to spend just $2 million in the current fiscal year, which ends September 31, mostly for creating a “special government staff office to manage the effort.” For the 2004 budget year, the administration says, “project costs are not to exceed $60 million.” But that $60 million is not actually in the budget plan provided to the Congress, and the Homeland Security report states that the administration will “not seek additional or supplemental funding for this effort.” That prompted a pointed question in Byrd’s letter last week to Ridge. “If the Administration does not plan to request additional funding for the [research],” he asked, “how will the activities in the program plan … be funded?”
According to the Office of Management and Budget, the administration has made no efforts to seek to have money shifted from one line item to another within the budget; nor has it sought new monies for anti-missile defense research. With Washington approaching the summer months, when little of substance gets done, and with the new fiscal year beginning shortly after the Congress returns to work in September, there is little evidence that the administration has firm spending plans for 2004.
And even if the $60 million does materialize, it’s not enough, critics say. “Anything under $100 million is chump change,” said one Capitol Hill source who asked to remain anonymous.
The net effect, Israel says, is that the White House is putting lives at risk. “The more we know about the threat of [portable missiles],” he said in an interview, “the more we know we need to defend against it. We were given a warning shot last year when shoulder-fired missiles missed an Israeli jet in Kenya, but we cannot count on their missing next time. I am happy that the administration has now acknowledged the threat, but they must follow through with real action … We’ve debated it. We’ve held hearings on it. We’ve researched it. We’ve studied it. We’ve analyzed it. Now it’s time to act on it.”
Boxer sounded a similar theme in an interview Friday. “We have known for a long time that there is a credible threat of attack against our commercial aircraft,” she said. “Although there is progress being made by the administration, this progress is too slow.”
Byrd and others describe the White House budget plans as a window onto Bush’s priorities. By this measure, the need to protect airliners from missile attack seems to be a back-burner issue.
Administration officials, of course, disagree. In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security has been trumpeting its efforts at surveying the areas around airports to identify the locations from which terrorists are most likely to launch a portable-missile attack. And in a letter last month to House Armed Services chairman Duncan Hunter, Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II seemed to back that plan in outlining his opposition to the Israel-Boxer bill. “The Department of Defense recommends exploration of other potentially effective measures such as counter-proliferation, airfield security, and improved border control,” Haynes wrote.
But experts in thwarting missile attacks, both inside and outside the government, say that approach simply won’t work. “Most of the current proposals for securing the airspace around airports are either unworkable or useless,” says Daniel Goure, a defense analyst at the nonpartisan Lexington Institute who served on Bush’s Department of Defense transition team.
One reason is that aircraft are vulnerable to even the oldest shoulder-launched missiles just before they land if they are within a long, roughly triangular swath of territory, about 4 to 6 miles wide, that extends 50 miles or more from the airport. An Air Force official recently noted that airport security measures are doomed to failure because the area around an airfield that needs to be secured in order to protect airliners ranges from 900 to 1,800 cubic miles of airspace.
“All a terrorist has to do is hide in the back of a pickup truck, under a tarp,” said one intelligence official who asked not to be named. “When the driver of the truck spots a target aircraft and stops, all the shooter needs to do is throw off the tarp, stand and fire. It will only take a matter of seconds, and there is no way to stop that kind of attack.”
Other signals reinforce the sense that the White House does not view the situation with urgency.
After reviewing the technology available for protecting passenger jets from missile attack, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Homeland Security Council concluded that only two companies are involved in developing directional infrared countermeasures systems: Northrop Grumman, an American company that builds the Air Force’s new large aircraft laser system, and BAE, a U.K. firm working on a laser system for the Navy’s tactical aircraft. But the review failed to identify a third alternative: Israeli defense contractor Rafael also builds a laser anti-missile system, and unlike the Northrop Grumman and BAE systems, Rafael’s system has actually been tested on a commercial jet against live missiles — something the Bush administration’s plan does not envision doing until around 2005.
Rafael’s test occurred from March 9 to 13 at Israel’s southern Uvda Air Force Base and involved the very Boeing 757 that was attacked in Kenya. Using a variety of missiles, fired from several angles and distances, Rafael’s system successfully jammed every missile fired at the jet. Despite these impressive results, and the lower cost of Rafael’s system, it does not appear that this system is in the running to protect U.S. passengers.
Regardless of which system or systems might eventually receive approval from the Department of Homeland Security, none will be allowed onto airliners without the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration. Here again, the Bush administration is taking a go-slow approach. Current plans do not call for any action on FAA certification to begin until the autumn of 2004, and then the certification process is expected to take a year or more.
When asked whether the FAA could accelerate its assessment of whether anti-missile systems adversely affect such critical issues as aircraft electrical and hydraulic systems, weight balance, and flight response, an FAA spokeswoman said the agency “can do anything on an expedited basis if [it] has enough people.” But extra people means extra money, and that does not appear to be forthcoming.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, security officials were able to restore passenger confidence by federalizing security personnel and implementing more rigorous passenger- and baggage-screening procedures. But if a U.S. passenger jet is shot out of the sky with a shoulder-launched missile, there are few confidence-building security improvements that could be implemented quickly to restore confidence in the security of the civil aviation system.
Even if anti-missile systems were installed aboard every airliner, that would still only be a part of the overall solution. Jets equipped with anti-missile defense systems can be hit by what the military calls “leakers” — missiles that get through an aircraft’s defensive systems. Because of this, the U.S. military conducts “live fire” testing, in which missiles are fired at aircraft and aircraft components to obtain data on how to build aircraft able to withstand missile hits. Robert E. Ball, widely recognized as an expert in the field of aircraft survivability and the author of the world’s only textbook on the subject, notes that live-fire testing “costs very little compared to the cost of the aircraft and the value of the lives saved.”
James O’Bryon, a retired Pentagon official who for years headed up the Defense Department’s live-fire testing program, says that live-fire testing typically adds a fraction of 1 percent to the cost of aircraft, about the same as the expense that crash-testing adds to a new automobile. As an added benefit to this approach, the design modifications that allow an aircraft to survive a missile hit also provide a degree of protection against threats such as rocket-propelled grenades, high-caliber machine guns, and sniper rifles.
But this is another area where the Bush administration has been unwilling to spend money. “Until we can test commercial aircraft through live-fire testing,” one Defense Department official told Salon, “we will remain in the dark as to how the aircraft respond to a [shoulder-launched missile] attack.” It may be that for certain aircraft, relatively minor engineering modifications, such as moving or armoring hydraulic lines, will result in making airliners far less likely to be lost if hit by a missile.
Many experts inside and outside government believe that it is almost inevitable that al-Qaida or another group will try to take down a U.S. airliner with a shoulder-launched missile. Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of counter-terrorism operations for the CIA, says that al-Qaida has a history of learning from its failures; neither the government nor the public should assume that the next group of al-Qaida operatives sent to bring down a jet will duplicate the mistakes made in Mombasa, he says.
“Time and again,” Byrd told Salon, “the Bush administration pays lip service to the nation’s great homeland security needs, yet when push comes to shove, they steadily refuse to put forth the necessary resources. Words and promises need to be backed up with the money to make those words a reality.”
