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Reprinted from THE FUTURIST,
July-August 1989 |
[EDITORS NOTE: Seems that the government
didn't read this article]
The
Growing Threat of
Terrorism
By Marvin J. Cetron
Summary: International terrorism will continue to grow into
the twenty-first century. Increasingly, homegrown terrorism will be
a problem for the United States.
There can be no doubt that
terrorism will continue into the next century. It is the primary way
in which the weak and disenfranchised can ensure that their voices
will be heard and that governments will feel the pressure to meet
their demands, even when they are counter to the will of the
majority. It is a war of psychology and perception. The terrorist's
message to the targeted government is, "No matter how big and
powerful you are, no matter how small we are, we can hurt you if you
don't do what we want."
Bombing, assassination, and
kidnapping will continue because they carry the terrorist message
effectively. These crimes instill fear in the populace, because they
never know when they will be hurt. As a result, citizens question
the true power of their government.
Terrorist attacks are effective
because the terrorist can use any damage done anywhere to get his or
her point across. Since it is impossible to guard every person,
every bus or every place of business in a country all the time, the
terrorist merely has to wait for a convenient moment to strike. No
act of terrorism is ever "senseless," since a climate of fear and
mistrust is precisely what the terrorist wants.
In 1986, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff lumped all forms of Third World violence together under the
term "low-intensity conflict." According to the joint chiefs, "Low
intensity conflict is a limited, politico-military struggle to
achieve political, social, economic, or psychological objectives. It
is often protracted and ranges from diplomatic, economic, and
psychological pressures through terrorism and insurgency.
Low-intensity conflict is generally confined to a geographical area
and is often characterized by constraints on the weaponry, tactics,
and level of violence." Former Secretary of Defense Caspar
Weinberger says that "low-intensity conflict [is] the most immediate
threat to free-world security for the rest of this century."
Since the 1960s, low-intensity
conflict has undergone a worldwide revolution in its scope and
organization. The United States and Great Britain organized special
operations military and paramilitary forces to deal with
insurrections in the Third World, while the Soviet Union began
teaching the Palestine Liberation Organization how to fight
effectively after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in 1967.
Terrorist activity has always had
its roots in specific political or religious conflicts within
specific geographic areas. But when nations saw the chance to extend
their spheres of influence without expending their own troops, they
fostered this covert warfare, raising levels of training and even
developing weapons specifically for terrorism and counterinsurgency.
The quantum leap in the level of terrorist activity from 1960 to the
present — both in numbers and sophistication — has left the
superpowers struggling to catch up.
New Weapons
The traditional weapons of the terrorist were cheap, readily
available, and would do the job. They ranged from the knife to the
small automatic rifle to the plastic explosive. But now that they
have the money and technical facilities of whole countries to back
them, terrorists have a whole new range of weapons to use against a
completely new set of targets:
- Stinger hand-held rockets.
Small, light, and powerful, Stingers can be used — with almost
no training — to knock out an airplane.
- Computer viruses.
Viruses are programs that destroy data stored in a computer's
memory. It is relatively easy for a programmer to write a program
that will tell the computer to erase its memory or otherwise
render its programs useless. What makes these viruses so hard to
trace is that they often contain timing instructions, so that it
might be months between the time a virus is introduced and the
time it is triggered. The programmer simply embeds the codes into
an otherwise harmless program, then tries to get the program into
a victim's computer.
- Electromagnetic pulse generators.
Put a pulse generator on the power line to an important
computer, and the pulse will wipe out the data in the computer's
memory.
- Chemical and biological weapons.
Chemical weapons range from old-fashioned poison in the water
and nerve gas to a new Liquid Metal Embrittlement agent (LME).
Applied with a felt-tip type pen, LME is a clear, invisible
substance that changes the chemical structure of a metal so that
it is no longer resilient and flexible. The result: The metal can
fracture under stress. Trucks, airplanes, or bridges would be
vulnerable to catastrophic failure without advance warning.
The standard chemical weapons
are frightening because they can be concocted from cheap and
readily available materials. Common pesticide and fertilizer
components can be used to make poison gas, while deadly chlorine
gas can be obtained from the electrolysis of ocean water.
Some 20 countries are now
developing chemical weapons, and at least 10 countries are working
on biological weapons, according to CIA Director William Webster.
Chemical and biological weapons
may become the "nuclear weapons" of small countries, since they
are weapons of mass destruction that are easier to come by than
nuclear weapons. Perhaps industrialized nations should consider
banning from their schools and universities students from
developing countries manufacturing biological or chemical weapons,
since you can't produce these without a substantial technical
education.
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Unlikely
Terrorist Acts
Marvin Cetron says there
are five terrorist attacks that are unlikely to occur in the
near future in the United States, since such actions would
be absolute acts of war, requiring, high-power, violent
retaliation:
1. There will be no attack on the U.S. Congress.
2. There will be no nuclear attack on any U.S. city.
3. Though there will be threats, no one will poison the
water supply of a whole U.S. city.
4. The will be no well-coordinated, general attack on
transport (e.g., blowing up railroad bridges),
communications (destroying telephone centers), or the
electrical power system (destroying many line transformers)
to cripple a large part of the United States. Though
small-scale individual attacks could occur at any time, a
coordinated nationwide attack is beyond the means of most
likely terrorist groups in the next decade.
5. No violent attacks or hostage taking will take place at
TV or radio stations or newspaper offices, because
terrorists know they need media publicity. The American
media stick together against all outside attack. |
- Nuclear Weapons.
Technically, it is horrifyingly easy to produce an atomic bomb:
Actual plans for building a bomb have been printed several times.
The hardest part is obtaining the teaspoonful of weapons-grade
plutonium that will produce an explosion the size of that produced
by the Hiroshima bomb. Nuclear energy plants produce this
substance as waste material. Though waste-storage sites and
transports are closely guarded, there is at least 100 pounds of
plutonium missing from various sites and shipments around the
world. That's not very much over the course of the 40+ years since
the development of nuclear power, but it means that it is possible
that there are terrorists in possession of both the knowledge and
the materials to build atomic bombs.
The Coming Rise in Domestic Terror
The biggest change in low-intensity conflict in the next decade will
be an explosion in the incidence of domestic terror in the United
States. Security measures currently in place around the world will
help slow the spread of international terrorism, but the frustrated
in the United States will begin to take their cue from terrorists
abroad. Some of the groups that have already begun terrorist-type
actions include:
- Antiabortionists. Planned
Parenthood offices and women's health clinics that offer abortion
have already been bombed. Attacks will get worse because religious
groups believe that God's law puts them above civil law and other
people's rights.
- Drug dealers.
Terrorism by drug dealers will aim at breaking the resistance
of city and state governments and law enforcement agencies. It
will be sponsored by organized crime and "disorganized crime" —
the kind of crazed violence observed in crack users that stuns
those who haven't seen it. The methods may be inspired by the
international terrorists, but the organized-crime armies have been
trained and weaned in Colombian drug wars.
The U.S. government can muster
tremendous resources to fight terrorism within its borders, and
national leaders have always had to deal with threats from other
countries. Few city mayors or state governments, however, are
psychologically prepared or fiscally and strategically able to
deal with sustained pressure from terrorism.
- Counterterror from the right.
In Colombia, people who got tired of police inability to deal with
terrorism have formed death squads to "help out" the police. The
same thing could happen in the United States.
New Targets
Many vital industries and resources are staggeringly vulnerable
to attack. Even if there were the will to do so, it would be
expensive and inconvenient to guard every office and factory. But
some changes will have to be made to reduce their vulnerability to
crippling terrorist attacks.
Computer attacks already account
for some 60% of all terrorist attacks in the world. Twenty-four
computer centers were bombed in West Germany in one year. Italy's
Red Brigades and France's Action Directe have both targeted computer
systems in Europe. It is only a matter of time before someone takes
advantage of U.S. computer vulnerability.
France and Spain have already felt
the terror when antinuclear groups broke into nuclear plants to
protest their operation. These groups only shut down the power, but
there is the threat of reactor meltdown and widespread radiation
damage due to terrorist attacks on these facilities.
Only two pipelines supply
virtually all the natural gas to the northeastern United States.
Both are regulated by high-pressure pumps that are manufactured in
foreign countries, with replacement times of more than a year. Both
pipelines are essentially unprotected.
Two bridges, one over the Ohio
River near Cincinnati, the other over the Potomac River near
Washington, D.C., handle all the north-south railroad traffic in the
eastern United States. Neither is guarded.
Fewer than 10 regional switching
stations control virtually all the telephone communications in all
the large cities of the United States. In May 1988, one of these
stations caught fire in Hinsdale, Illinois, a suburb southwest of
Chicago. It is an automated facility, with a single watchman on site
and an overseer who monitors warning lights in a facility 100 miles
away. By the time the technicians actually believed their warning
lights and summoned help, the station was destroyed, plunging
one-third of all western Chicago phones into silence. Because the
station was between O'Hare Airport in Chicago and the regional air
traffic control center in Aurora, Illinois, O'Hare was without much
of its air traffic controls for hours.
Even with round-the-clock work
crews, it took three months to repair the station. Phone service was
not fully restored until August. With no phone transmission of any
kind, many computer networks also went down. Only cellular phones
using satellite transmission, such as car phones, were unaffected.
The telephone switching station
fire points to a vexing problem for the increasingly high-tech
industrial United States. There are fewer and fewer individuals who
monitor the safety of the nation's highly automated industrial
facilities. The human overseers who are there have enough experience
with faulty equipment that they often distrust malfunction signals.
The telephone overseer in Illinois disregarded his first "fire"
signal because there was an electrical storm between his office and
the switching station, and he knew that could cause a false display.
Another problem is that these automated systems often have security
systems that are tied to regular electric and phone transmission
lines. If something happens to the electrical or telephone system,
the security people are often "left in the dark."
Fighting the Plague
An effective war against terrorism must be fought on two fronts:
the military and the political. Until very recently, the U.S.
approach to fighting terrorism was completely defensive and
reactive. According to Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, formerly chief of
the CIA, "As late as 1980, there was no focused, ongoing
intelligence-collection effort to try to pin down the scale of
terrorist activity." In 1981, the Reagan administration set about
correcting this situation. The president called on the State
Department, the CIA, the FBI, and the military to pool their
resources. They formulated strategies for dealing with terrorists
and insurgents. From this brain trust came the notion of
low-intensity conflict.
Police, military, intelligence,
and security people are on alert now around the world. They look for
concealed weapons, check for correct ID and passports, and watch
borders for movements of known terrorists or suspicious characters.
These measures should help prevent incidents like the bombing of the
Marine barracks in Lebanon.
In combating terror, it is
important to recognize that terrorists themselves differ widely in
their motives and level of commitment. On a practical level, this
means that some activists will be more open to dissuasion and more
reachable than others. We can stop some violence — and we can tone
down other acts — by our response to terrorist actions.
Fawaz Younis is a terrorist. He
was the leader and spokesman for the group that hijacked and
destroyed a Royal Jordanian airliner, and he took part in the hijack
of TWA Flight 847, in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed. Younis was
tracked by the FBI and CIA, then set up and lured into a trap.
Arrested in international waters off Cyprus, Younis was brought by
the Navy to stand trial for his crimes and was recently found guilty
in a U.S. court. However, questions about the method of his arrest
and the conditions under which he made a confession raised the
serious possibility that Younis might be freed by a judge before he
ever faced trial.
Alberto Franceschini represents a
different type of activist — one much more like the type we are
likely to find within the United States. One of the three founders
of the Red Brigades, the terrorist organization that killed Italian
Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978, Franceschini was betrayed and
arrested. In prison, with time to analyze his experience,
Franceschini decided to give up terrorism. "Armed struggle was
useless," he says, "because Italy wanted not a revolution but simply
to live well." Franceschini contrasts his Red Brigades with the
Basque separatist movement, which has "a broad social base extending
from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat . . . it is an independence
movement, with deep cultural and historical roots, something the Red
Brigades lack."
If we can better understand these
different types of terrorism, we will be better able to deal with
them. Younis is typical of international terrorism today. He is
motivated by deep-seated nationalism and religion; for that reason,
his political movement has widespread popular support. There was
little question of his guilt, since he freely admitted his part in
terrorist activities. Convicted in his trial, he will likely be seen
by his supporters as a martyr to his cause. If he had been set free,
he would have declared it a victory for his movement and vindication
of their point of view, not a failure of the U.S. justice system.
The types of terrorists likely to
surface in the United States in the next decade will be closer to
the Franceschini type than to that of Younis. Like the Italians,
most Americans want only to live well, so that violent activists
must by their nature be tiny groups trying to impose their extreme
views on the majority. In order to defeat terrorism, that majority
must be unflinching in the face of extreme, unrelenting, painful
attacks.
The justice system must never waiver
in dealing as harshly as possible with those who resort to violence
to enforce their will. Groups that advocate or condone violence must
never be underestimated or overlooked. Granted, the most deeply
committed of the terrorists will never be fazed by the threat of
punishment. But group members may be persuaded to abandon violence.
An activist faced with life in prison for terrorist acts may well
decide that the risk is not worth the possible benefit gained.
The most dangerous of homegrown
activists in the United States are, by this reasoning, the
collection of groups with religious motivation, such as the
antiabortionists. These groups, which have already been involved in
a number of violent incidents around the United States, take God's
word as their stepping-off point. It is but a small step for the
most-fanatical antiabortionists to say that their stance is not
merely prolife but pro-God; for them, violence, even murder, may no
longer be a crime but a necessary if regrettable means to a
necessary end. In this, they have much in common with Moslem
fundamentalists, who swore to kill writer Salman Rushdie when his
novel The Satanic Verses seemed to grant their religion
less respect than they felt it was due.
If ever we let know terrorists go
free because of a technicality of the law, we only convince them
further of the rightness of their cause. If ever we negotiate with
kidnappers, we only demonstrate our weakness and their correct
selection of a target.
Former French Prime Minister
Jacques Chirac made a statement about dealing with terrorists
several years ago:
When you negotiate with people
who take hostages, you are obliged, in the negotiation, to give
something. It may be just a little…but you have to give something.
Once you have given something, the kidnapper gains from his
action. So what is his normal…reaction? He does it again, thinking
that it is a way of obtaining what he cannot obtain by other
means.
So you get caught in a process….
You can get two, three, or four hostages freed. But you give the
kidnapper an inducement to seize another four, five or six. So it
is an extraordinarily dangerous and irresponsible process. That's
why I don't negotiate.
Unfortunately, Chirac forgot his
high principles when he was losing a presidential election and
negotiated the release of three French citizens held captive in
Lebanon in return for paying off a French loan in Iran.
Winning the War Against Terrorism
War with terrorists is a bit of a high-wire act. A country's
response to a terrorist raid must be tough enough to encourage its
allies and to convey the message that the country won't stop
fighting after the first black eye. And the terrorists must be told
that the nation will not be intimidated, no matter what the threats
or crimes. On the other hand, the response must not be so harsh that
the allies desert the cause or the terrorists and their backers are
forced to escalate their response, starting a war.
U.S. law enforcement authorities
will have their hands full coping with the new tide of domestic
terrorism in the next century. Swamped by this flood of stateside
terrorism, local governments and police forces will press the
federal government to enact laws that allow extraordinary measures
to be taken in certain situations, the new legislation will define
terrorism and clarify the duties of federal and state authorities.
Meanwhile, the decriminalization of drugs will take away the
motivation for drug merchants to conduct a terrorist war against law
enforcement authorities. After a number of attacks on industrial
sites, the United States will finally get smart and post security
forces around computer centers, reservoirs, electrical power
stations, and phone switching stations.
Make no mistake about it:
Terrorism is here to stay because it is still a useful tool for
conveying an old message. It will take 10 to 15 years before the
United States can get its act together to end the new terrorism. In
the meantime, the best remedy against future terrorism is better
preparation now: The United States must prepare psychologically,
socially, and militarily. Security systems in the public and private
sectors must be rethought — and hard questions about laws and
theories of justice must be asked.
About the Author
Marvin J. Cetron
<mailto:marglo@tili.com>, Ph.D., is president of Forecasting
International Ltd., which for four decades has been tracking the key
forces changing our world. His most recent special report for the
World Future Society, "50
Trends Now Changing the World" (2001, 28 pages), is available
from the Futurist Bookstore for $8 ($7.20 for Society members), cat.
no. R-2369.
This article is
excerpted from American Renaissance: Our Life at the Turn of the
21st Century, co-authored by Cetron and Owen Davies.
