Living with Snakes
MARTIN, JAY
Living with Snakes Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism By Timothy Naftali Basic. 399 pp. $26.00. Reviewed by Jay Martin Professor of government, Claremont McKenna...
...Behind Blind Spot's factual data there lies a 60-year chronicle of policy evasion...
...counterterrorism measures, making the transition from Cold War strategies to defending against the transmission of terror from the Middle East proved tortuous...
...On the sad evidence of Timothy Naftali's book, 34 years later Reston still has the last word...
...Nor are the reactive, provisional "solutions" that have been the rule-in the Executive branch, in Congress, in business, and in international communities...
...The United Nations might have provided a vehicle for international coordination and unity...
...terrorism, after all, is a worldwide plague...
...Renaming agencies, replacing staff, making grand claims for the importance of security is not a policy...
...Terrorist strikes at the U.S...
...Circumventing the Judiciary, this program, "H/T Lingual," was clearly unconstitutional...
...Under President George W. Bush, a Homeland Security Department has been created and a coordinator of counterterrorism has been named...
...The USSR is the fountainhead of international terror (later the title was shifted to Iran...
...Although it was apparent during John F. Kennedy's Administration that airplanes were one of the softest and most effective targets forterrorists, the aircraft industry, the airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration strenuously resisted every attempt to safeguard air travel...
...Commenting on Hersh's findings, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger added that there were additional illegal activities "in the history of the Agency" not noticed by the reporter...
...Typically, various antiterrorism "working groups" in the Executive branch have been staffed at such low levels that their efforts ended up buried, if included at all, in off icial reports...
...At different stages, the whole issue has been politicized from both the Left and the Right...
...Then came the shattering events of September 11, 2001...
...The same patterns have obtained in the Legislative branch...
...And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of...
...As far back as September 11, 1970, New York Times columnist James Reston wrote: "The supreme irony in this age of power is its impotence to deal with determined or fanatical minorities...
...Smooth transitions were complicated further by the periodic dismantling of counterintelligence operators...
...If American interests are attacked, this will occur beyond our borders...
...The result was an unstable, contradictory, systemless "system" without meaningful guidelines...
...In 1975, a Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank F. Church (D.-Idaho) curtailed the use of informants...
...On the surface, everything seemed to change after 9/11...
...However, Naftali writes, "at the UN, where so many newly independent countries were finding their political voices . . . discussions in the General Assembly over what to do about terrorism quickly dissolved into debates over what constituted terrorism, as opposed to legitimate acts of anticolonialism...
...Information from them, when it reached the White House, ranged widely in currency...
...As Naftali observes, the President's Daily Briefing frequently contained "uncorroborated or already rejected information...
...encounters with terrorism over the past six decades...
...For the most part, though, he leaves it to the reader to grasp the political, economic, structural, and cultural reasons for the feebleness of American counterterrorism efforts...
...Here is a short list of the misguided conventional wisdom: Terrorism is a state-sponsored tactic...
...Even in 1972, after hijackers seized a plane and threatened to crash it into the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to precipitate a nuclear disaster, few changes followed...
...Terrorists are generally motivated by political gain...
...operations in neighboring Afghanistan...
...These units sometimes numbered 30 or more and functioned separately...
...The second serious problem in confronting terrorism has involved rigid assumptions that were eventually proved wrong...
...The President, the Vice President and the National Security Advisor, along with the departments of State, Defense, Justice, Treasury, and Transportation, each have held disparate views about appropriate ways to tackle terror...
...religion plays an insignificant role...
...author, "The Education of John Dewey" Timothy Naftali has composed a meticulous, year-by-year account of U.S...
...The National Rifle Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, corporate interests, and political radicals were allied in efforts to reduce official intrusions...
...Reviewed by Jay Martin Professor of government, Claremont McKenna College...
...As early as 1974, journalist Seymour Hersh exposed illegal CIA activities...
...Beyond the government, conditions were no less paradoxical...
...In 1987, when William H. Webster assumed the directorship, he called the CIA "an amalgamation of baronial directorates...
...has tended to merely react to individual terrorist events while ignoring their underlying implications...
...When the FBI, in a periodic fiscal entrenchment, cut off informant Emad Salem, he bitterly remarked: "Don't call me when the bombs go off...
...A little deeper look, though, reveals no compelling evidence that the government or the public is moving toward a posture that would reduce fragmentation, prevent rigid thinking, and truly engage the complex terrorism issue...
...Vice President George H. W. Bush unsuccessfully proposed a terrorist "czar" in 1986...
...The Nuclear Nonproliferation Act, amended in 1994, and the Arms Export Control Act ofthat year "left little room for the [Bill] Clinton Administration to maneuver" in negotiating with Pakistan over U.S...
...For those charged with carrying out U.S...
...For 24 years, from Harry S. Truman's Administration through Gerald R. Ford's, the Postmaster General secretly turned over to the FBI letters suspected of terrorist contents...
...Legal restrictions and organizational arcana obstruct cooperation as well...
...Congress, wary of public opinion, has alternated between killing proposals to fund strong antiterrorism measures and passing legislation to severely restrict the investigation of suspected terrorists...
...Changes in administrations and personnel have introduced further discontinuity...
...Nazi plans in 1944 to create a 35,000 man insurgency were swiftly crushed before V-E Day...
...Naftali's evidence suggests four basic shortcomings in the American response to terrorism: fragmentation, reliance on "conventional wisdom," an inability to keep up with the shifting aims of terrorists, and dereliction in developing adequate counterterrorism policies...
...will most likely employ weapons of mass destruction-chemical, biological or nuclear...
...But without the guidance of clear, carefully formulated policies, structures and their occupants are fragile entities...
...Neither is rhetorically declaring terrorism an "act of war," as Presidents Ronald Reagan and Clinton did...
...Outside the U.S., considerations of American commerce, negotiations with allies, possible damage to the international banking system, the need to share information with counterterrorism agencies abroad, and diplomatic efforts to free hostages compounded this fragmentation...
...The FBI and the CIA have also persistently lacked a common strategy, in large part because the former emphasizes law enforcement and the latter focuses on analyzing information it gathers...
...Conflicts between the White House and Congress have led to illegal activities...
...That illegal and unethical investigative practices had become commonplace belied a critical policy problem...
...Successive administrations have taken vigorous action in times of international conflict...
...But we must now live in a jungle filled with poisonous snakes...
...Under Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, for instance, the FBI could not share grand jury information with the CIA...
...Armed air marshals, reinforced cockpit doors, and the screening of passengers and checked baggage were suggested by the Richard M. Nixon Administration but were summarily dismissed as too costly and too intrusive...
...But in peacetime the US...
...Not long after, in 1993, a group of conspirators he had named set off bombs in the World Trade Center...
...R. James Woolsey, President Clinton's CIA director, defined the problem colorfully: "We have slain a dragon...
...Fragmentation has been especially apparent in the Executive branch...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
