USA Today October 5, 2001
Ports vulnerable to terror
Committee heads warn that new dangers lurk, call for reshaping of U.S. intelligence
By Susan Page
WASHINGTON -- Airport security has been significantly tightened in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, but terrorists are more likely to strike at U.S. seaports or some other target next time in an effort to create a sense of fear in Americans' lives, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham said Thursday. "Today, probably airlines and airports are among the least likely targets of attack," the Florida Democrat said.
"I'm frankly surprised that we haven't had an attack yet at a seaport. To me, they are a much more vulnerable area than airports -- those tens of thousands of containers that come into America every day from around the world with only a minuscule number of them being inspected." At a breakfast with USA TODAY and Gannett News Service, Graham and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss said that an overhaul of the nation's intelligence services, which were created for the Cold War, was overdue to deal with new threats from shadowy networks of religious fanatics.
The United States presents a "target-rich environment" for such groups, analyst John Pike said at a session with USA TODAY on Wednesday. In Washington, museums crowded with tourists, bridges and overpasses that could be leveled with truck bombs, food courts and shopping malls all are difficult to protect, said Pike, director of a non-profit group called GlobalSecurity.org that studies military and intelligence issues.
Varying their targets suits terrorists' aims, Graham said. "Their goal is fear, F-E-A-R, and the way you create fear is you make people feel that every aspect of their life . . . is at risk."
Goss and Graham, Congress' leading officials on intelligence, said Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has been convincingly tied to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington by financial and surveillance intelligence gathered by the United States. "My view is when you look at it all, you have an unmistakable picture," Goss said.
Goss, a former CIA operative, warned against focusing exclusively on bin Laden and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that has sheltered him, however. "It's much broader and it's much wider," the Florida Republican said. "We cannot just get fixated on that or, if we can bring bin Laden to justice and deal (with) some of the Taliban problems, say, 'Well, we won,' and go home."
They said shortcomings in U.S. intelligence followed a failure to adjust to a new world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. There has been too much focus on high-tech hardware and a reluctance to take risks, they said. The CIA, FBI and other U.S. agencies have failed to share information and work together effectively. "On Sept. 11, we paid the ultimate price for the failure to evolve intelligence as the world we were trying to understand was evolving," Graham said.
The lawmakers expressed concern that Tom Ridge, who takes over a new White House Office of Homeland Security next week, won't have enough clout to coordinate intelligence agencies' work. Bush created the office by executive order, but Graham said Congress eventually would have to vote to establish a new federal agency. Otherwise, he said, Ridge won't have the authority to "bang heads."
Both congressional committees are considering plans to reorganize the intelligence community. The House committee is proposing a commission to study what went wrong on Sept. 11. But Goss said the goal would be "how do we improve our capabilities, not a usual Washington commission on who should we hang and how high should the tree be?"
Copyright 2001 Gannett Company, Inc.
