The difficulties of fighting terrorism, from identifying the enemy to over-libertarian legislation

President Bush has stated it time and again: the war against terrorism begun in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks will cause bloodshed, will last years and will rarely be seen on television. It will be a war waged mainly by intelligence agencies, but it will also entail bombings, the deployment of special forces and conflicts between nations. Above all, it will be a war that will concern us all, because the investigations carried out after the New York tragedy show that the most treacherous enemies are in our very midst, in the guise of model students, of good husbands or of willing workers, and they can be defeated only through active cooperation from ourselves. For better or worse, that describes the situation for the coming years as predicted by experts, who admonish us, moreover, never to let our guard down, because even after the defeat of the Taliban and the routing of Bin Laden, an attack may come at any moment and from any quarter. The on-the-spot opinions expressed by many commentators, who said that the events of September 11 2001 would change the world, were not far off the mark. That day may not go down in history like the discovery of America or the storming of the Bastille, but nonetheless it represents a momentous turning point: it has revealed the extreme vulnerability of our society, it has widened the divide between the Judaical-Christian world and Islam, and it has laid the basis for the definitive acceptance of Russia in the community of western nations. It has also marked our awakening to a phenomenon – Islamic fundamentalism - which we had long underestimated, letting it spread throughout Europe without giving it due notice. In reaction to that earlier indifference, governments are now scrambling to set up new and extraordinary instruments for fighting the enemy and preventing him from exploiting out love of liberty for his own aims. These changes have already been stigmatized by the defenders of civil rights, who fear that the war against terrorism might end up jeopardizing the fundamental tenets of the state of law. While terrorism has an ancient history and is certainly nothing new to police forces the world over, there are two new conditions that we are to confront with: 1) Fundamentalists can count on unspecified numbers of agents who are not only ready to give up their lives for a cause, but also have the technical, military and cultural background for carrying out highly sophisticated actions; 2) They are imbued with so much hate for us that they make no difference between military and civil objectives – their ultimate goal being our destruction. All this gives them unprecedented possibilities against which we are – for the moment - unprepared. Not only might they try to replicate, in some other part of the world, the launching of a hijacked civil airliner full of fuel against a chosen target, with the perspective of inflicting the maximum damage at the minimum cost, but they are also capable of attacking nuclear power stations or setting off dirty bombs (conventional explosive devices loaded with radioactive material) inside a sports stadium. In the first case they would trigger a “Chernobyl effect”, in the second they would contaminate thousands of people in one stroke. And if they do have access to nuclear devices, even without the rockets normally used to carry them to destination, they need only unbridle their imagination to choose particularly vulnerable targets. One prospect that greatly alarms police authorities worldwide would be packing a bomb inside a normal cargo container and detonating it by remote control once the ship has entered the port of New York, London or Genoa; or, alternatively, loading a bomb on one of the many tramp ships still afloat, which would then send out an SOS close to the designated seaport and wait to be towed into harbour by the victims themselves. For the moment, despite menacing proclamation from the sheikh of terror, neither al-Qaeda nor any of its affiliate organizations appear to be in possession of actual nuclear weapons, but they might still be able to acquire them through three means which are currently being investigated: through the help of fundamentalist scientists in Pakistan, from Iraq, or through the services of scientists from the ex-Soviet Union who have been left unemployed and have fallen under the lure of Bin Laden’s dollars. Another threat comes from the “suitcase nukes” once stocked by the KGB, some of which are said to have been stolen from their storage in Russia (or sold by disloyal guardians) during the years of chaos. The “liberation” of Afghanistan, and the subsequent neutralization of the laboratories and depots installed by al-Qaeda under Taliban protection, have, however, considerably reduced the nuclear menace. A more tangible threat comes from the use of chemical and biological weapons, already discovered in several of Bin Laden’s bases around Kabul and Kandahar and which are also available to rogue countries and can be produced relatively easily in well-equipped laboratories. Several commentators have even expressed surprise that the terrorists have not yet resorted to the use of nerve gas, which they are known to possess, as the members of a Japanese cult did a few years ago when they released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway. The reason probably lies in al-Qaeda’s overall strategic view, which seems to aim only at performing highly spectacular operations, leaving small- and medium-scale actions to be carried out by their supporters; it should also be considered that truly devastating effects can be obtained with sarin only in very special conditions, despite the alarmism in the media. In order to “fly high” with this kind of weapons, terrorists would have to contaminate large water systems, or introduce a lethal gas into the ventilation system of a large building, or release the substance over the population from a plane. However, technical difficulties, according to experts, are stronger than may appear at first glance. As for bioweapons, we have seen that a spate of letters laced with anthrax spores – probably mailed not by agents of al-Qaeda but by an American resident – was enough to spread panic in the United States, although the actual number of victims was luckily very small. In this case too there would seem to be scores of possibilities for terrorist action, but the actual threat is not as deadly as has been described. Anthrax is not transmitted by person-to-person contact, smallpox and the plague can be countered by immunization, and the only frightful menace remains the Ebola virus. Spreading these diseases on a vast scale, however, requires uncommon expertise and a well-structured organization of people who know how to handle viruses and bacteria, such as al-Qaeda does not appear to have at present. Of course fundamentalists can always resort to more conventional methods, executed perhaps by suicide agents, as widely seen in Israel. The difficulty of setting up an adequate defence has been proved by Israel’s own situation, where one of the most efficient and tested intelligence services in the world has not been able to prevent a large number of attacks from being carried out over the past decades. No precaution nor surveillance measure can suffice when dealing with people for whom anyone is a potential target and who – as the Palestinian extremists – have facile access to money, arms, ammunition and explosives. The same difficulties have been experienced by Spain with ETA, by Italy with the Red Brigades, by France with the Corsican nationalists and by Great Britain with the IRA. Coexistence would be possible, however, with conventional Islamic terrorism, because all countries have the expertise to restrain it and also because the public has somehow become inured to it. Conversely, there is an element of uncertainty on the information front, which has shown its vulnerability on various occasions: a concerted attack brought against specific systems, for example an air-traffic control network, might not provoke victims but would cause disruption and paralysis, albeit for a short time, throughout affected countries. What is really disconcerting is the extent of the infiltration attained by the al-Qaeda network not only in the United States but in all western countries as well. Now that hunting down terrorists has become a priority for police forces worldwide, not a day goes by without news of an arrest or the discovery of a new cell or the exposure of more accomplices. Between October and November alone, the FBI has detained 1200 suspects in the United States, while the CIA has requested and obtained the arrest of no less than 500 extremists in 50 different countries. We are discovering with distress the extent to which Bin Laden’s raving theories have taken hold in Islamic centres throughout Europe, transforming them in so many recruiting centres for new terrorists, who already have their place in western societies and are therefore ready to pass on directly to active operations. We are dismayed to discover the infinite economic and financial ramifications of al-Qaeda, that has applied great skill and first-rate operators to put the global market at its service in pursuing its sinister ends. The impression is that of a criminal organization under an absolute code of silence, so structured as to prevent any infiltration and therefore able to resist even a full-scale offensive. The United States and the European Union have been quick to realize their lack of adequate instruments with which to confront such an enemy, and have taken immediate corrective action, on the one hand by strengthening the services designated to fight them, on the other by granting them a wider scope of action. The government of the United States has gone further than all, granting the police ample powers of investigation and arrest and establishing – as in wartime – special tribunals for trying terrorists. Britain has not done less and has introduced the faculty of detaining without trial any Muslim suspected of collusion with al-Qaeda, as happens in wartime with the citizens of enemy countries. France and Germany have revived all or part of the anti-terrorist laws dating back to the years of terrorism, and even Italy has rushed to change its legislation and has proposed to grant agents engaged in the fight against fundamentalists the licence – if not to kill – to commit with impunity a certain number of crimes in the course of their activities. Many countries have relaxed the laws governing telephone interceptions and e-mail screening, while new restrictions are being imposed on immigration. At the same time, cooperation is being reinforced between the police and the intelligence agencies of countries considering themselves possible targets of al-Qaeda, in some cases overleaping long-standing mistrust. This cooperation has in part materialized as new international agreements, such as the institution of a European arrest warrant, and in part has given rise to a more intense and continued exchange of information, which, according to a high-ranking White House official, “will end up being more useful to the cause of cooperation between the various armed forces”. While waiting for this colossal campaign to break down the fundamentalists’ operations network, thereby preventing them from carrying out further attacks, unprecedented efforts have been made everywhere to provide effective protection, with the employment of army forces, to the more vulnerable targets: airports, nuclear plants, chemical industries, refineries, oil tankers, important monuments and so on. Unfortunately there are so many of them that resources are lacking to defend them all. However, the fact that two “red-alert periods”, during which new attacks were to be expected, have gone by harmlessly, shows that al-Qaeda has been if not mortally crippled at least significantly destabilized. In the light of these results, people are more willing to accept delays and inconveniences in air travel and frequent personal checks. President Bush has vowed to fight terrorism on all fronts and not to stop until it has been eliminated. This means that domestic operations will not be sufficient and that the attacks in Afghanistan will have to be followed up by more important actions, not only on the military level but on diplomatic levels as well. As long as the goal was to track down the sheikh of terror, who bears responsibility for the bloodiest and most spectacular attack in history, and to remove from power the people who allowed him to turn Afghanistan into a training field for his followers, the United States could count on ample consent. Now that the clean-up must be completed by confronting those countries that continue to provide hospitality, resources and weapons to the various terrorist movements infesting the world, the allied countries are bound to start making distinctions. Dismantling the al-Qaeda network, a clandestine organization that is a threat for all, is one thing, but another will be bringing to reason the rogue countries, who, with their arsenals of chemical, biological and (possibly) nuclear weapons, pose undoubtable threats to stability, but who also have a seat in the United Nations, are protected under international law, and can count on a strong network of economic relations. The next most obvious objective would appear to be Iraq, whose connections with al-Qaeda have been proved, but in view of possible resistance coming from Arab and European allies, the United States might decide to keep wide, targeting first such weaker countries as Somalia and Yemen. There will be more bombing, while at other times better results might derive from diplomatic blackmail of sorts. The main problem will be, as at the start, identifying the enemy and collecting sufficient evidence against him to take action without causing too many adverse reactions.

(Trad. Interpres sas Giussano)