Cooling the Terror Hype
By Larry Johnson on September 5, 2010 at 12:23 AM in Current Affairs
I am not a Fareed Zakaria fan at all. But he has written an important piece on the Terror industry and I hope folks pay attention to it:
Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.
I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap. . . .
In a crucially important Washington Post reporting project, “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin spent two years gathering information on how 9/11 has really changed America.
Here are some of the highlights. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.
This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.” Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.
Can we agree that we need to go after terrorists using every tool at our disposal? I have spent the last 16 years working with the US military forces that have the counter terrorism mission. These are elite, highly specialized forces. Most of their activities are top secret. I wish I could tell you that George W. Bush unleashed the fury and that these guys have been killing terrorists right and left. Not quite true. George Bush did give them plenty of authority to hunt down and kill terrorists. The problem is that the terrorists don’t cooperate. They, the terrorists, do not operate in in large groups. They do not occupy fixed bases. They do not build infrastructure. I wish they did. It would make killing them so much easier.
Instead, finding them requires the kind of work that police and intelligence agencies do. The point is simple–although using special ops warriors to whack bad guys is appealing to us emotionally, they rarely get to act outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Further compounding the task of finding terrorists is the fact that they are not numerous. They don’t wear uniforms. Then there is the problem of getting permission to enter a country and carry out military operations. Fiction writers like Vince Flynn make up bullshit that we send five guys on a small plane and they carry out an operation. That’s Flynn’s vision, it is not reality.
Locating and finding terrorists is really a task best carried out by police and intelligence agencies. Unfortunately, we have created a Rube Goldberg system that is not coordinated and has ballooned into a massive jobs program for white people. Here’s the truth, we can cut the intel community by 25% and not lose any serious capability.
We need to find a balance. This means we accept terrorism as a threat we should take seriously but we do not need to spend millions of dollars to fight a small number of fanatical ragheads. There are too many corporations who have used terrorism as wedge to get Federal money. There are too many Government bureaucracies now using terrorism to justify their existence. We need some sanity here folks and Fareed’s article is an important reminder of that fact.
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