A Citizen's Guide to Terrorism and Counterterrorism

Christopher C. Harmon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134662715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This Citizen's Guide addresses the public policy issues of terrorism and counterterrorism in the United States after Bin Laden's death. Written for the thinking citizen and student alike, this succinct and up-to-date book takes a "grand strategy" approach toward terrorism and uses examples and issues drawn from present-day perpetrators and actors.

Christopher Harmon, a veteran academic of military theory who has also instructed U.S. and foreign military officers, organizes his book into four sections. He first introduces the problem of America's continued vulnerability to terrorist attack by reviewing the long line of recent attacks and attempts against the U.S., focusing specifically on New York City. Part II examines the varied ways in which the U.S. is already fighting terrorism, highlighting the labors of diverse experts, government offices, intelligence and military personnel, and foreign allies. The book outlines the various aspects of the U.S. strategy, including intelligence, diplomacy, public diplomacy, economic counterterrorism, and law and law-making. Next, Harmon sketches the prospects for further action, steering clear of simple partisanship and instead listing recommendations with pros and cons and also including factual stories of how individual citizens have made a difference in the national effort against terrorism.

This concise book will contribute to our understanding of the problems surrounding terrorism and counterterrorism—and the approaches the United States may take to meet them—in the early 21 st century

Part I

The Threat

1

We Americans Remain Vulnerable to Terrorist Attack

Expecting to kill at least 40 people with his home-made car bomb, Faisal Shahzad parked it in Times Square, New York City, and returned to his home in Connecticut. With the calculation characteristic of a terrorist, he had monitored live video feeds over the Internet for three months, studying the square to decide when and where to position the car bomb in order to kill the most Americans.

On May 1, 2010, his cold-blooded work seemed all done. He logged onto his home computer to contact his handlers in the Pakistani Taliban.¹ They had helped to plan and finance the attack, and stayed in touch with Shahzad via a special software program that had been installed in his computer during his training. With the bomb in place, it remained only to await results. The defendant later admitted he had planned to commit a further attack two weeks later, also in New York City. He would continue, he said, until capture or death.² But New York street vendor Duane Jackson saw smoke emitting from the terrorist’s bombladen SUV. Jackson alerted police—a tribute to the city’s ongoing “If you see something, say something” campaign urging citizens to do the right thing. Police officers responded swiftly; the defective bomb made from fertilizer and gas was defused. The terrorist Shahzad was captured at the airport boarding a Royal Emirates flight out of New York.

The plot is but one of a long string of obsessive and destructive plans for mass murder in one of America’s greatest cities. For terrorists, New York’s attractions include great towers, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty, busy ports and transportation hubs, and almost any mass gathering of citizens. Even the presence of the United Nations (UN) headquarters building infuriates Al Qaeda and its comrades, who declaim the organization as a tool of the United States, inherently anti-Muslim, and an enemy of their own plans for a multinational Muslim caliphate. “The blind sheik,” Egypt’s Omar Abdul Rahman, whose followers conducted the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, had the UN building on his list of projected targets, along with the Holland Tunnel linking New York and New Jersey.

For two decades we have seen one attempt after another to rend New York City with a massive attack on civilians. Here are examples of what followed the first truck bomb attempt against the twin towers. In March 1994, a Lebanese named Rashid Najib Baz opened fire on a van transporting Hasidic youths over the Brooklyn Bridge; one rider died and three more were injured. In mid-1997, West Bank Palestinians Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer and Lafi Taisir Khalil entered the country over the Canadian border and took up an apartment in Brooklyn, where they prepared a suicide vest and nail bombs for an attack on subway riders.³ Police raiding this safe house also found a portrait of “Sheik” Rahman of Egypt. September 11, 2001 hardly needs mention; there is an astonishing audiotape, released three months after the tragedy, of Osama bin Laden and close associates (perhaps huddled in Kandahar) exulting about how the results of the 9/11 plot exceeded all hopes, and praising Allah.⁴ In 2009 came another plot against the subways, with direction from senior Al Qaeda planner Adnan G. el Shukrijumah, apparently working from Waziristan in northwest Pakistan.⁵ The same year saw pre-emption of a plot by four men seeking to deploy man-portable missiles to shoot down military planes at a New York air base, and use explosives to blow up a synagogue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.⁶

New Yorkers share such dangers with the rest of us, and Bostonians still getting over the shock of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings are not the only concerned citizens. Consider that sprawling metro area, Washington, D.C. The Capitol, the White House, and the Pentagon are all targets of today’s terrorists. One Al Qaeda journal recommended shooting up noted restaurants in D.C. when the “power lunch” crowd could be victims. A run of incidents and plots in recent years underscores how acute the threat is for any of our large metropolitan areas. Portland, Oregon, escaped a car bomb plot in late November 2010; the target was a gathering for a Christmas tree lighting in a public square. One year before, on Christmas Day, 2009, in a plot begun in Yemen, “Underwear Bomber” Umar Farok Abdulmutallab flew from Amsterdam toward Detroit. Intelligence later suggested that the Motor City was selected in part due to the differing prices of air tickets for various U.S. destinations—an entirely banal reason for murderers to consider. As victims, any Americans would do.

Smaller cities and towns are also potential targets, and any concentration of Americans is targetable according to the illogic of the new partisans of religious war. Even single assassinations are highly recommended. Instructions are available to any of the “self-radicalized” readers of such Al Qaeda organs as INSPIRE magazine, which began publication in Yemen in 2010. As he moved closer and closer to bombing Fort Hood in Texas in July 2011, suspect Jason Naser Abdo was carrying instructions for bomb-making from this journal.⁷ In New England, in early 2013, one of the Boston Marathon bombers had INSPIRE logged into their home computer; their very attack would be lauded in the next issue, no. 11 (May 2013). For INSPIRE readers, “Jihad as individual duty” is a central precept of Islamist dogma, and open exhortations to “terrorism” remove any doubts about whether “jihad” is merely personal spiritual struggle. The same theme runs through the many writings of ideologist Ayman al Zawahiri, now the most authoritative of Al Qaeda leaders. Even though Al Zawahiri is a surgeon trained to heal, he can busy himself penning instructions for the common man to use in killing Americans and other infidels with such simple tools as a knife or an iron bar. This perverse counsel echoes advice in the Al Qaeda manual⁸ discovered by police in Manchester, England, and used as evidence in subsequent trials of Al Qaeda men: the public could see the clinical detail in which assassinations and larger-scale attacks are planned and described, employing poisons, “cold steel,” or other deadly means.

A Changing Picture Since the Cold War

The post-Cold War age is a fortunate one in most ways. There have been no uses of nuclear weapons and no major world wars. We have not been attacked in a conventional war, and the last of those (when Russian invaded Georgia) left our immediate interests untouched. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact swept away scores of state agents busily supporting international terrorist groups. If Russia’s return to despotism is serious, and even deadly (for a few Russians who have been regime critics), at least Washington has peaceable relations with Moscow. North Korea, while bizarre, embedded in international crime, fascinated by nuclear technology, and threatening war on South Korea, is not killing Americans. Although it does still skirmish with South Koreans, North Korea was removed from the official “state sponsors of terrorism list” by the George W. Bush administration. China has lost most of its Maoist fervor, and while its defense budget keeps climbing, its conquests of late are economic, not geographic. Our past enemies, Germany, Italy, and Japan, are today’s best friends, models of liberal democracy and partners when we need them. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization came to our side in the 9/11 crisis, declaring that “an attack upon one is an attack upon all,” and today NATO is larger and perhaps more capable than ever before.

But we find the world still troubled by several state sponsors of international terrorism. Iraq and Libya have worked themselves off the shortlist maintained by the Department of State. Still on the list, however, are the northern half of Sudan and Cuba—although neither state has been acting very aggressively on the international stage. High on the list are Syria and Iran. This pair has made an unequal but successful partnership for three decades in aiding Middle Eastern terror groups, especially Hamas, the Palestine Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah of Lebanon, and Saudi Hezbollah, all of whom have killed Americans. An Iranian armed unit, the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, attempted in 2011 to use an Iranian American with Mexican contacts to murder the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. while he was in Washington, D.C.⁹ By 2013, Quds Force combatants were directly committed to fighting to protect a key Iranian ally, Syria’s government, which was tottering. Tehran also takes care of Lebanon’s fierce Hezbollah and shovels money, arms, training, and documents to sub-state actors making war upon Israel, other neighbors, and Western interests.

During recent years it has become undeniable that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terror. This sometime-partner, sometime-plague replies to international criticism by saying, first, that it is the victim of terrorism; and, second, that it has aggressively pursued Al Qaeda, killing, capturing, or extraditing many. Both points are true. But overwhelming evidence ties this restless, nuclear-capable state to a range of other bloody incidents and groups, especially the Taliban, who contest the elected government of Afghanistan. Kashmiri separatists of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) not only enjoy Pakistani support as they carry on each year damaging democratic India; communications intercepts also show a Pakistani ISI (intelligence) officer in a command-and-control role during the horrific LeT attack on civilians all over Mumbai in November 2008.¹⁰

To these state sponsors of terror (Iran, Syria, Sudan, Cuba), and to Pakistan, which has not yet been formally designated,¹¹ we must add smaller surprises on the international stage. Power hungry and violent, sometimes as technically adept as state foes, are the militant groups that political scientists call “sub-state actors.” The post-Cold War world knows more of them than it would want, and in diversity that at times bewilders. Old nationalisms still fester—as on the island of Corsica where scores of minor terrorist attacks occur each year. Other militants recall with hope the brief empowerment of fascism in Europe and Asia during the 20th century: in the Czech Republic, Russia, Hungary, and the United States, these neo-Nazis work to advance their stunted dreams. Their opposites—anarchists, who condemn all government save perhaps local councils with no power—imagine themselves to be on the rise in Italy and in Greece, and the latter country is terribly vulnerable. New groups in Africa, and older ones in Latin America, prey upon the international oil companies and local businesses. The Lord’s Resistance Army in Africa, a transnational troublemaker, claims adherence to the Ten Commandments but is in the businesses of child slavery and mass murder of villagers. That is akin in its way to the tragic distortions of religion and politics of such willful leaders as Ayman al Zawahiri of Al Qaeda and the Taliban’s Mullah Omar. Such militant groups are dangerous to Americans today, and given their lust for weapons of mass destruction may be more dangerous than certain small foreign countries. Indeed, since 9/11, the UN Security Council’s language about terrorists has often equated them to major state aggressors.¹²

Consider Aum Shinrikyo, part religious cult and part failed political party. This Japanese group made four different gas attacks in 1995,¹³ including the sarin gas deployment on multiple subway cars, sickening 5,000 people in Tokyo in a few hours, and permanently wrecking the lives and health of hundreds. Its scientists also made biological weapons, while other Aum cadre were hunting uranium ore on land bought in Australia. They plotted anthrax attacks in Japan coincidentally alike to the one that actually occurred several years later in America. Probably made by one lone warped U.S. scientist, that attack killed five U.S. citizens and injured 17 more in a “terror-by-mail” campaign of late 2001. The specter of an actual plague of anthrax cannot be ignored. Our public health system is unprepared for an outbreak of smallpox or many other diseases. Right-wingers and certain other Americans, and Islamists of contemporary days, have shown fascination with the plant-based toxin ricin, famously used by the communist bloc Secret Services in 1978 to kill a political opponent. West European authorities have uncovered ricin plots in several countries, and the recipe for making the poison from beans is spelled out in the Jihad manual of Al Qaeda.¹⁴ Islamist revolutionaries are interested in other kinds of poisons as well. France arrested Islamists in possession of a nuclear/biological/chemical warfare suit, and then, in 2004, arrested an Algerian called “The Chemist,” trained in Afghanistan’s camps. Chlorine gas was used in several insurgent attacks in Iraq. Italian police interrupted a 2002 plot to deploy cyanide gas in a utilities service tunnel underneath our embassy in Rome. The tape of an eerie telephone call proves how the Moroccan perpetrators hoped to deploy cyanide crystals to yield the gas that would suffocate Americans working above in the building. In one case, if not more, terrorists have plotted to undertake a strike inside the United States with a “radiological dispersal device,” a limited amount of nuclear material scattered by conventional explosive. Fortunately, such nuclear material is a technical challenge to handle, however small the amount.

The danger of mass casualty attacks is not limited to specialized high-tech weapons, however. Ours is a country with semi-automatic weapons and tens of millions of other guns. The kinds of terrorist plots to unfold include those by individual shooters, as at Los Angeles International Airport (July 2002) and an Army-Navy Career Center in Little Rock, Arkansas (June 2009). Other plots have been based around a group of terrorists assaulting with simple but deadly hand-held weapons, which are easy to procure and to transport in a free society. This was planned at Fort Dix (January 2006). It was Mumbai, India, that suffered a “model” assault: in November 2008 a dozen men trained in Pakistan tore at the large, peaceable, and modern Indian city, shooting citizens as if they were penned rabbits. The terrorists of Lashkar e Taiba (“Army of the Pure”) evaded authorities for more than two days, killing ceaselessly. Lesser but tactically similar attacks with small arms have occurred at others’ hands in the Middle East and elsewhere. A military commander of Al Qaeda, Saif al Adel, is reported to favor the Mumbai style of attack by the Militant Islamist International. And for would-be murderers who cannot find teammates, Al Qaeda organs such as INSPIRE publish details on how a single militant could burn down his apartment complex, or use a welding machine to turn the pickup truck in his garage into a sort of scythed war chariot.¹⁵ Hate-fueled imaginations do not merely run wild; their conceptions are printed in color for study and adoption by the “faithful.” Many Americans recognize the danger in such tactics and wonder aloud “why it hasn’t happened here?” The answer is that it can. It may. It did in central London with the audacious knife attack by two Islamist men in May 2013.

As many Americans have learned since 9/11, the self-proclaimed “jihadis” believe they are at war, call for more war, and are conducting war, on whatever scale they can manage, day by day, and worldwide. Their motives can be understood and will be addressed in the next chapter. What it means for us is serious. Here at home the threats are manifest, and Americans have seen a lengthening line of plots (blessedly interrupted!). And U.S. citizens venturing abroad, whether tourists, officials, or humanitarian aid givers, are under new dangers. Scandinavia, once seeming immune, now encounters small-scale but lethal violence tied to Middle Easterners and Islamist terrorists. June 2011 saw a new conviction of conspirators in the plots against staff of a Danish newspaper; Chicago businessman Tahawwur Rana was jailed ...