Fighting Terrorism Read online

  Against such active anti-terror activities, the amateur practitioners of domestic terrorism, unschooled in the arts of covert action, do not stand a chance. But the trouble with such active anti-terror activities is that, unlike passive measures, they do constitute a substantial intrusion on the lives of those who are being monitored. Steeped as they are in moral and legal respect for the privacy of the individual, Western democracies have been hesitant—and justifiably so—to embark on activities which remind them too much of the doings of the authoritarian states they so abhor. Indeed, every one of the active steps that a democratic state can take against domestic terrorists constitutes a certain curtailment of someone’s freedom to speak, assemble, or practice his religion without interference. One need only consider the activities involved in building a domestic terrorist organization to recognize that these groups invariably engage in incitement, pamphleteering, and indoctrination toward their purposes, and gather to lay plans and prepare for their execution. In some cases, the incitement is also of a religious or quasi-religious nature—as in the cases of abortion-clinic bombers and Islamic advocates of jihad, Islamic holy war. And it is just these kinds of speech, assembly, and religious expression which, if properly monitored, give law enforcement agencies the warning they need in order to head off calamity.

  The governments of free societies charged with fighting a rising tide of terrorism are thus faced with a democratic dilemma: If they do not fight terrorism with the means available to them, they endanger their citizenry; if they do, they appear to endanger the very freedoms which they are charged to protect.

  In the United States, such freedoms are more scrupulously protected than in any other country in the world, and there are even some who claim that free speech and religious freedom should be considered “absolute” rights. While even the most passionate advocates of civil liberties concede, along with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, that freedom of expression must stop at “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” American law has thus far been rigidly resistant to limiting the scope of such exceptions. Just how far the concern with free speech has gone was driven home to me in a recent conversation with a security expert who explained the constraints imposed on the FBI by the Attorney General’s guidelines which govern monitoring activities: They prohibit law enforcement officials from using government funds to so much as buy a newsletter by a militant group in order to examine it for threats of terrorist activity—and if an official were to pay for the newsletter out of his own pocket, he would be prohibited from storing the clippings in a government office, because such rudimentary intelligence gathering is considered an “infringement” on the liberties of the groups involved.

  The guidelines, instituted as a reaction to federal activities in the Vietnam War era, permit the FBI to engage in “investigations” of crimes committed in the past or crimes presently being planned. But in the long run, each criminal investigation produces only a tiny part of the picture of extremist organization and political violence in the United States; the total is no more than a collection of fragments. At present, the FBI is not allowed to perform the most basic intelligence activities required for piecing together the puzzle of political ideology, incitement, infrastructure, and paramilitary organization which, once assembled, could lead to an understanding of where the most deadly terrorism is likely to come from. Such monitoring could possibly have led to an early identification of the Patriots of Arizona as a probable trouble spot, and might even have prevented the tragedy in Oklahoma City; without it, the FBI is a blinded Samson, fit to fight but incapable of seeing its enemies.

  An example of how domestic intelligence work such as that forbidden to the FBI has made all the difference in the European counter-terror effort was provided by Christian Lochte, former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the branch of the German security services responsible for anti-terror activities. In December 1982, a neo-Nazi terrorist group embarked on a campaign of bombings against the cars of American GIs, eventually turning on Israeli targets in Vienna, Amsterdam, and Geneva. Lochte reports that at first the security services were baffled by the attacks, since they seemed to be part of the neo-Nazi terrorism which had spawned attacks like the 1980 bombing of the Munich Oktoberfest, which had claimed thirteen lives. But while some of the existing neo-Nazi groups had clearly begun to practice terror against German targets, their association with attacks against American servicemen could not be explained by any of the information available from previous crimes. The key to the mystery was found in an ideological tract published in 1982 by two West German radicals, Walter Hexel and Odfried Hepp, entitled Farewell to Hitlerism. In it, Hexel and Hepp renounced the traditional Nazi hostility toward Soviet Communism, identifying American imperialism as a hostile occupying force from which West Germany had to be freed through a “liberation struggle” by a renewed Nazism. The idea of an anti-Western Nazism sympathetic to the Soviet Union eventually led to the identification of Hexel and Hepp as the leaders of a new terrorist group, which was eventually found to have been trained in Lebanon by the Soviet-sponsored PLO and to have mounted the attacks in collusion with Abul Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Front faction.1

  Of course, there is something laudable in the efforts of Western democracies to hold their governments to the highest possible standards when it comes to respecting the rights of their citizens—including not having intelligence gathered about them. From the days of Robespierre’s infamous Committee for Public Safety, democracies have had to guard against this danger, couched in terms of national security, which unduly invades the privacy of each citizen in the name of national security. Yet the threat to the basic civic rights of not fighting terrorism are even more debilitating to a free society. We often forget the monstrous violation of personal rights which is the lot of the victims of terror and their families, or the wholesale violation of the rights of entire citizenries when they are forced to expend time and resources to protect themselves against potential terrorist attacks—not to mention the more subtle violation of basic human rights involved when a person, or an entire people, must learn to live in fear.

  The belief that freedom of speech and religion are absolutes that cannot be compromised even in the slightest way out of very real security concerns is merely tantamount to replacing one kind of violation of rights with another, even worse violation of those same rights. It is evident that such terror-inflicted violations of the civil rights of a people may, if attacks are an extraordinary rarity, be insufficient to justify taking any kind of serious action; but it is equally evident that there is some point at which terror becomes by far the bigger threat to citizens’ rights and the time comes to take unflinching action. In this regard, there is apparently a moment of truth in the life of many modern democracies when it is clear that the unlimited defense of civil liberties has gone too far and impedes the protection of life and liberty, and governments decide to adopt active measures against the forces that menace their societies. In Britain, that moment came in 1973, after IRA violence had reached unprecedented heights. That year the British Parliament passed an Emergency Provisions Act, providing for arrest, search and seizure without a warrant, relaxed rules of evidence, trials conducted by lone judges (to avoid intimidated juries), and outlawing membership in a terrorist organization. For Germany, the moment of truth came in 1976, with the kidnapping and murder of the industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer by the Baader-Meinhof group. The result was a revolution in German criminal law giving the security services an extended right of detention without warrant, as well as a substantial removal of constraints on search and seizure. For Italy, the moment came in 1978, with the abduction and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, which led the Italians to give their security services powers similar to those adopted in Germany, plus a special amnesty law allowing terrorists to turn themselves in and become state’s witnesses. In France, a spree of bombings by Hizballah in the mid-1980s at the Galeries Lafayette, the Place de l�
�Opéra, the Champs-Elysées and other centers of cultural life led to a build-up of passive defenses so thick that parts of Paris had at times begun to look like an army encampment. Finally, in 1986, the French reached their moment of truth and moved to an active anti-terror policy that led to the elimination of that terrorist threat on French soil.

  In fact, the record of active anti-terror techniques, once adopted, has been excellent. In the wake of active anti-terror action by democratic governments in the 1970s and 1980s, the most notorious of European domestic terrorist groups were eliminated one by one, including the Baader-Meinhof, the German Red Army Faction, the Italian Red Brigades, Action Directe in France, and Germany’s bizarre anti-Western neo-Nazi terrorist cells. Thus Europe was for the most part freed of the plague of domestically grown terrorism. Lethal IRA terrorism, while not eliminated, was reduced by more than 80 percent. 2

  Most recently, it was Japan that faced a potentially disastrous domestic terrorist threat and moved swiftly to overcome it. The attempt by an obscure cultist group Aum Shinrikyo to poison Tokyo’s congested subways with sarin—one of the most toxic chemicals ever developed—was not the first time Japan had to deal with Japanese-bred terrorists. The Japanese Red Army, whose heyday was in the 1970s, had been a terrorist group directed primarily outward. Cooperating openly with the PLO, and less openly as well with European terrorist factions, most of its attacks were carried out beyond Japan’s borders. The Japanese powers therefore did not apply their full weight against the group, and did not in any way test the limits of Japan’s democratic institutions in fighting it. Japan’s Red Army withered as the pro-Soviet terror axis of which it was a part disintegrated, eventually all but disappearing under less than overwhelming pressure from the Japanese government.

  Yet in 1995 Japan found itself facing a much more immediate terrorist threat. As in any other land, Japanese culture occasionally breeds wild offshoots of what could be called Japanese fundamentalists—private militias centered around charismatic leaders who use terrorism and violence to bring a straying Japan back to the “pure” ways of an older order. Well remembered is the warrior group of the celebrated ultra-nationalist novelist Yukio Mishima, who in 1970 attempted a takeover of the government as unfeasible as it was public, only to commit suicide before the watching eyes of his nation. The sarin attack was of course a far more serious event, drawing the attention of the world because of the extraordinary deadliness of the menace. Although it failed to produce the mass catastrophe that had been planned, it became immediately clear that without the most determined action, the next attack could indeed succeed in bringing about the deaths of thousands. Faced with this contingency, the Japanese government did what it had failed to do in the past. It used every power available to it, including unlimited surveillance and an aggressive sweep of searches and seizures. Results quickly followed: The group’s leader was located and placed under arrest, the group’s weapons’ caches and poison factories uncovered—along with two tons of chemicals and over $7 million in cash—and its thousands of members all but neutralized as a challenge to Japanese society. Japan, like many democracies before it, had reached its moment of truth—and acted.

  While the United States and Canada have been hesitant to follow the lead of the European states and Japan in moving against their terrorist enemies at home, this is not to say the great democracies on the western side of the Atlantic have had no experience with a more aggressive anti-terror policy. In 1970 Canada was faced with a spate of domestic terror at the hands of the Quebecois Liberation Front (FLQ), a tiny separatist group which got as far as blowing up a plane. The Canadians responded by invoking the War Measures Act of 1942, granting extensive emergency powers to the security services, which in short order reduced the FLQ to a memory. Looking back, we can see that it was this quick and draconian action which stamped out domestic terrorism in Canada for decades to come.

  Perhaps the most striking example in which the United States was forced to momentarily curtail civil liberties in the face of potential terrorist activity occurred during the Gulf War. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, Iraq was by no means a world military power, and Saddam’s chances of winning a conventional war were slim. But Saddam had several cards up his sleeve that he believed might be able to make the Americans think twice. One was his arsenal of Scud missiles and chemical-weapons stockpiles, which he claimed to be willing to use to “incinerate half of Israel,” thereby hoping to shift the focus of the war to an Arab-Israeli confrontation and splitting the Arab partners in the international coalition arrayed against him; the other was terror, which he threatened to loose against the United States and its allies in the event of a counteroffensive in Kuwait. Indeed, there was every reason to think that Saddam would be able to make good on his threats. Iraq had long been one of the foremost sponsors of international terrorism, hosting in Baghdad such terrorist groups as the Abu Nidal organization, Abul Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), and the organization of the notorious bomb maker Abu Ibrahim. Yasir Arafat’s PLO, which had an extensive network of operatives among Palestinian Arabs residing in Kuwait, provided Saddam with valuable intelligence which he used in planning the invasion, and there was a danger that the PLO would join in conjuring up an unprecedented wave of anti-Western mayhem at Saddam’s behest. Other pro-terror states, such as Sudan and Yemen, supported Saddam as well. Indeed, of all the central sponsors of international terrorism then active, only Syria refrained from supporting Iraq’s promised “mother of all wars”—out of a neighborly interest in seeing Saddam toppled, and in exchange for billions of dollars in Saudi money brokered by the American government.

  While most people are aware of the results of Saddam’s missile attacks against Israel—thirty-nine barrages against Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities resulted in only a single death from the actual bombardment—less is remembered about the terrorist front of the war against Saddam. Even before the war, the American intelligence community recognized that with the majority of the world’s terrorist networks poised to assault Western targets, the Allied invasion of Kuwait could easily end up being a costly affair even if the Allied troops won the land and air battles handily. There was no viable option of passive defense against the terrorists, and the Bush administration concluded that there was no choice but to follow the Europeans’ lead and adopt a more activist policy. It ordered “a crackdown on all potential sources of threat,” which included surveillance, searches, interrogations, and expulsions en masse of Iraqi diplomats, PLO operatives, and other potential agents of Iraqi terror. For possibly the first time in decades, a concerted anti-terror effort was conducted simultaneously by the governments of virtually every democratic nation. And the result was an unambiguous victory for the Western security services. Of 173 terrorist attacks during the weeks of the Gulf War, 143 took place in Third World and Arab countries; the terrorists were able to pull off a total of only thirty attacks against the principal enemy, the Western countries, and these were for the most part unsuccessful, inflicting no more than ten deaths among them. In this way, the promised threat of fearful terror directed against the United States and its allies was quietly reduced to irrelevance.3

  A grisly postscript to this story took place in Greece, where students expelled from the country on suspicion of being a security threat were allowed to return the month after the end of the war—only to blow themselves up in a post office in the college town of Patras, while trying to mail a package bomb to the British legation. Seven people were killed in the blast. The “students” were members of the Islamic Jihad Brigades, one of the six known factions of the Islamic Jihad; this one an organ of the “Western Sector” terror apparatus in Yasir Arafat’s Fatah.

  What these examples show is that domestic terrorism—and, as we have just seen, under certain conditions international terrorism as well—can be controlled, reversed, or defeated outright by the democratic nations. There is no question that the United States has the political culture and operat
ional capacity to eviscerate domestic terror. The question is whether it has yet reached that same moment of truth which brought the major Western European countries to allow their security services to take the vigorous action needed to uproot the terror in the midst of their societies.

  The basic barrier to such action in the United States is essentially one of political philosophy and jurisprudence. Some Americans fear that an active anti-terror strategy would compromise the free, democratic nature of American society. Yet in none of the democracies has the adoption of firm anti-terror measures led to a significant or lasting curtailment of individual freedoms. It did require, however, the explicit revision of the widespread conviction that a democratic society can guarantee the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, the bearing of arms, diplomatic immunity, and political asylum—as if they were practically absolutes. They are not and cannot be absolutes, as the record of terrorist abuse of these democratic freedoms demonstrates again and again. The fact is that both the primary co-conspirators in the World Trade Center bombing entered the United States as political refugees—one from Iraq and the other claiming he had been oppressed in Israel (both would have most likely received political asylum had they not spoiled their chances by blowing up a building). More bizarre is the fact that a fatwah (Islamic legal ruling) ordering the death of Salman Rushdie for having written The Satanic Verses is—incredibly—being preached in the United States as “protected” speech, shielded by an absurdly generous interpretation of “freedom of speech and religion.” Still more disturbing is the utterly excessive American generosity in interpreting the “right” to bear arms as including freedom from practically any kind of licensing and government supervision, a freedom well abused by David Koresh’s militaristic messianic Branch Davidian cult in its incendiary confrontation with federal agents in Waco, Texas, in 1993, leaving scores dead. In the absence of countervailing legislation, other ultra-nationalist “militia” and neo-Nazis continue to conduct battalion-level exercises in barely veiled preparation for coming military action against the American government, of the sort which produced the Oklahoma City bombing, and yet their activities, too, are considered constitutionally “protected.”