W A S H I N G T O N DC'

UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR

April 26, 2004

Daniel Marcus
General Council
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
301 7th Street, SW
Room 5125
Washington, DC 20407

Dear Mr. Marcus,

As a sociologist who has studied American society for the last 40 years, I am
deeply concerned about the impact of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the United States on the public, federal agencies, and the White House. The
cumulative and considerable effect seems to be to encourage one and all to better prepare
themselves against the kind of attacks that we had faced in the past rather than focusing
on the greatest dangers we next face. The 9-11 Commission hearings so far indicate that
the Commission presumes a symmetry between what we lacked last time — for instance,
open communication between the CIA and FBI and domestic spying of the kind MI-5
provides in the UK — and what we need to parry major new attacks. Thus, the
Commission unwittingly is contributing to a malaise that military historians have long
studied: fighting the last war rather than preparing for the next one.

One may say that this is merely a set of hearings. However, let me remind that
commission hearings constitute historical, formative moments. One such set of
Congressional hearings in effect ended the McCarthy era; another not only drove Nixon
out of office, but also led to major reforms in campaign financing. Most relevantly, the
hearings of the Church commission, which found that the FBI greatly abused its powers
by spying on American non-violent dissenters (including myself), resulted in the firewalls
that were erected between the FBI and the CIA and in numerous regulations that made the
surveillance of political clubs and places of worship (Mosques included) illegal.

Moreover, commission hearings in the past have had effects that run much deeper

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than changes in regulations and budgets; they have profoundly changed the informal
culture that greatly affects the behavior of both government agencies and the public. A
major reason why information about the 9-11 hijackers did not reach those it should have,
and why those it did reach refrained from acting, was that the pre-9-11 culture informed
FBI agents that their careers were endangered if they were too active in such matters.

The misdirected formative effects of the 9-11 Commission hearings are already
evident: they are driving us to focus on improving domestic surveillance (the formation of
an American MI-5 is seriously being considered). And the charge that the Bush
administration wrongly focused on Iraq rather than Al Qaeda is pushing the
Administration to pull all stops to find bin Laden before the elections, under the same
magic belief that led it to hold that if we caught Saddam, Iraq would be pacified.

The focus on past experience — which has other sources, but which is further
fostered by the Commission's hearings — drives the government and the public to focus
on two fronts in the war against terrorism while grossly neglecting the third and most
important front. First, we are "hardening" domestic targets. Because airplanes were the
last weapon of choice, we spend a giant portion of our domestic security budget on
airports; the budget for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is set at $5.3
billion for 2005. And now that trains have been attacked, we are moving to better protect
the rails. We seem to ignore that Al Qaeda rarely attacks twice in the same way or in the
same place. Indeed, we just found out that the next target of the terrorists in Spain was
going to be a shopping center. Furthermore, we have so many soft targets, from subways
to water mains, from stadiums to places of worship, that most of what we do on this front
is meant to assuage the public rather than truly protect us from the next attack.

The second front, and a somewhat more promising one, is the effort to capture
terrorists wherever they are, before they hit us. This is proving to be exceedingly difficult
because, in some areas of the world, terrorists are supported by the local populations and
protected by the terrain. For instance, Pakistan has just folded its drive in the
northwestern provinces and the U.S. has been unable to maintain an effective control of
southeastern Afghanistan. The U.S. is also having a hard time gaining the upper hand
against a few hundred terrorists that roam the jungles of the Philippines and the
somewhat larger number in the mountains of Columbia. Most important, even if the U.S.
eliminates several hundreds of these terrorists, there are so many millions of young, able-
bodied men (and women) who hate our guts that terrorist groups are finding it easy to
refurnish their lines whenever they are thinned out.

The third front, which was not involved in the last attack and which receives much
less attention and many fewer resources, is the effort to ensure that terrorists will be
unable to get hold of nuclear arms — the most effective means by which they could cause
harm of an order of magnitude that would make 9-11 look like small potatoes. (Most
chemical and biological agents are much more difficult to weaponize and employ than are
nuclear weapons, although these two should also get much more attention than box
cutters, pocket knives, and nail clippers). Fortunately, this front is much more delineated.
The number of nuclear devices that float around on the black market is limited. The
number of sites in which they are poorly protected is small and well known. The list of
experts who may illicitly help develop nuclear weapons is much shorter than that of
garden variety terrorists.

The 9-11 Commission would greatly contribute to re focusing the national attention
on the greatest threats if it asked:
a) why the U.S. has done so little to shut down the black market in nuclear bombs and the
machinery and material needed to build them;
b) why have the corporations that violated our laws and basic security needs not been
properly punished;
c) why have the various programs that aim to purchase nuclear bombs and material to
remove them from loose hands been given such low national priority, attention, and
budgets;
d) why have the various programs that aim to retrain or provide alternative employment to
nuclear scientists (and those who specialize in weaponized biological agents and
developing chemical weapons) been given such low national priority, attention, and
budget;
e) was the U.S. wise to look the other way when Pakistan fed the nuclear black market
and left its nukes poorly guarded, while focusing instead on pushing Pakistan to fighting
garden variety terrorists;
f) what can be done to vastly increase the scope and effectiveness of the Proliferation
Security Initiative (PSI); and
g) would the U.S. be well served by the creation of a special center for coordinating
intelligence concerning nuclear attacks so that relevant information will not be lost among
the endless streams of other information about terrorists? (This center could be a division
of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center.)

Although the preceding questions have been formed in terms of why things were not done
in the past, the deliberations should focus not on parceling out blame but on finding ways
to enhance these efforts in the future. Otherwise, the next 9-11 Commission, following a
terrorist attack using nuclear weapons, would list among the factors that left us under-
prepared, the current 9-11 Commission misfocused hearings and their formative effect.

Amitai Etzioni
AE/jlf
 LOS ANGELES TIMES
Commentary
The 9/11 Panel Looks the Wrong Way
By AMITAI ETZIONI
F
ast-forward three years. A bi-
partisan commission is con-
ducting hearings in Washing-
ton to determine why we were
asleep at the wheel when terror-
ists set off a nuclear device in one of our
major cities. The attack killed 300,000. It
shook the nation's confidence so pro-
foundly that the Constitution was "tem-
porarily" suspended; all civil liberties
were waived to prevent future attacks.
The new commission has established
that one of the reasons we failed to pre-
vent this tragedy was the impact of an
earlier commission and an earlier set of
healings: the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States, a.k.a. the 9/11 commission.
The problem was that the 9/11 investi-
gation spent too much time assigning
blame and looking backward. When it
came to recommending safeguards for
the future, it encouraged the public, fed-
eral agencies and the White House to plan
for the kinds of attacks we had faced in
the past rather than foreseeing dangers
to come. It unwittingly contributed to a
malaise that military historians have long
studied: fighting the last war rather than
preparing for the next one.
Could a mere congressional commis-
sion really have such a long-reaching ef-
fect? Indeed. A similar set of hearings
spelled the end of the McCarthy era. An-
other drove Richard Nixon out of office
and led to campaign finance reform. And
the Church Commission, which found
that the FBI improperly spied on domes-
tic dissenters during the 1960s, strength-
ened the wall between the FBI and the
CIA — the same wall that is now under at-
tack for its role in our 9/11 failures.
Consider the buzz emerging from the
9/11 commission now. In reaction to our
Probing the past won't
do. The gravest threat
is nuclear attack.
intelligence miscues, it's pushing public
opinion toward approving something like
an American MI5, a domestic spying
agency similar to Britain's. By highlight-
ing Bush's inattention to terrorism before
Sept. 11, it is no doubt abetting an admin-
istration desire to recoup politically by
dispatching Osama Bin Laden before the
elections. These actions might have
merit, but they don't block the gravest of
the foreseeable dangers posed by terror-
Ism — nuclear weapons.
In much the same way, our current
anti-terrorist strategies also miss the
point. Because airplanes were the previ-
ous weapon of choice, weVe earmarked
$5.17 billion in 2005 (out of $5.3 billion
budgeted for the Transportation Security
Administration) for airports. Now that
trains have been attacked in Madrid, we
are moving to better protect the rails. But
we seem to ignore that Al Qaeda rarely at-
tacks twice in the same way or in the same
place.
We're also spending billions trying to
eliminate terrorists — in Afghanistan, in
the Philippines and Indonesia, in Colom-
bia and in Europe — before they can hit
us. This could be effective, but it is also ex-
ceedingly difficult. Terrorists are mobile,
hidden and often protected by local popu-
lations. And there seems to be an unend-
ing supply of fresh recruits for every cell
we take out.
As for preventing terrorists from get-
ting their hands on nuclear weapons, it's a
strategy that by comparison gets little at-
tention and few resources. Approximately
MONDAY, APRIL 26, 2004 A13
$1 billion is set aside for the purpose, just
one-fifth of what we're spending to find
shoe bombs, box cutters and nail clippers
at airports. (Eliminating chemical and
biological weapons is also important but
less so, because those agents are much
more difficult to weaponize and employ
than nuclear material.)
Yet the nuclear threat can be met. The
number of nuclear devices floating
around on the black market is limited.
The number of sites where they are poorly
protected is small and well known. The
list of experts who might illicitly develop
nuclear weapons is relatively short.
The 9/11 commission, which is charged
not just with investigating the past but
preparing us for the future, should fix this
strategic imbalance. It should recom-
mend a substantial budget increase for
the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Re-
duction Program, which provides for the
supervised destruction of nuclear weap-
ons, the removal of "loose" plutonium
from global circulation, and alternative
training and employment of nuclear
weapons scientists.
It should also recommend an in-
creased commitment to the administra-
tion's Proliferation Security Initiative, a
set of international agreements that al-
lows the United States and its allies to
search planes and ships that are sus-
pected of carrying nuclear weapons and
material. And finally, it should call for the
creation of a special center for coordinat-
ing intelligence concerning nuclear at-
tacks so that it will not be lost among the
endless streams of other information
about terrorists.
Amitai Etzioni teaches sociology at
George Washington University. His book
"From Empire to Community: A New Ap-
proach to International Relations" (Pal-
grave) will be published in May.