Agence France Presse December 18, 2002
US shifts priorities for 2003 following September 11 attacks
By PATRICK ANIDJAR
Americans looking to the new year are rearranging priorities and travel plans and taking a closer look at that stranger in a shop or on a street and at the gaping holes in the security blanket they enjoyed before September 11, 2001 changed all the rules.
Fueling the national angst were burgeoning threats of more terrorist attacks as the frequency of suicide bombings in the Middle East grew exponentially and the United States girded for war with Iraq.
With terrorist attacks targeting US interests in Asia and Africa and experts warning of a resurgence of the al-Qaeda network that carried out the unprecedented September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the watchwords for 2003 were: security, security and security. "They are coming after us," warned Central Intelligence Agency chief John Tenet in September, referring to an al-Qaeda he said had "reconstituted" itself.
"They want to execute attacks," he said. "The threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer...It's serious."
"We are entering 2003 with the feeling that something will happen," said John Pike, a security specialist with Globalsecurity.org, who criticized the government for concentrating on Iraq at the expense of stateside threats.
"The reality," he said, "is that we are getting ready to blow up Iraq and nobody is spending much attention on homeland security...until the next attacks."
And there was this caveat from Democratic Senator Bob Graham, outgoing president of the Senate Intelligence Committee:
"It is almost a certainty that in the coming months Americans will face another attempted terrorist assault, an assault that quite possibly could be of the same scale as that of September the 11th, 2001."
Citizens of the United States, whose population includes far more Jews than Israel's, were particularly shaken by the suicide bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, November 28 and the near-miss rocket attack on an Israeli charter flight taking off from Mombasa the same day.
At the disposal of terrorists, say experts, are human bombs, car bombs, truck bombs, biological 7and chemical agents that can be delivered by mail, through drinking water supplies and introduced into huge industrial climate control systems.
A recent report in the Washington Post quoted US officials speaking of the possibility that al-Qaeda operatives or allies had obtained quantities of the horrific nerve agent, VX, from their friend, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who claims he possesses no such weapons of mass destruction.
The fledgling US Department of Homeland Security, signed into existence by Bush on November 25, is up and running, pulling together some 170,000 federal employees and 22 departments. "We have additional work to do," said Tom Ridge, the head of the cabinet-level agency.
But he added the inevitable caution: "We will never design the perfect system. We have to be right 1,000 times a day, every day of the week, every week of the year, forever."
The terrorists, he added, "only have to get it right once in a rare while."
State authorities are still waiting for Congress to cough up the 3.5 billion dollars President George W. Bush promised them last February to reinforce local disaster relief in case of attacks.
Daniel Benjamin, member of the National Security Council under former President Bill Clinton, summed up the 2003 security picture this way:
"Now the threat is clearly on the map, and it's time to start thinking innovatively" about protecting against it.
© Copyright 2002 Agence France Presse
