U.S. safer, but not immune, from terrorist attacks, 9/11 expert says
Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission, outlined the Commission's report Oct. 20 in Kresge Auditorium.
BY LISA TREI
The United States is safer but not safe since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to Philip Zelikow, executive director of the body known as the 9/11 Commission.
In a polished talk on Oct. 20 in Kresge Auditorium, Zelikow gave an outline of the 9/11 Commission Report released July 22. In late 2002, congressional legislation created the 10-member bipartisan commission to prepare an account of the circumstances surrounding the events of Sept. 11, 2001 -- the worst act of terrorism on U.S. soil -- and to provide recommendations designed to guard against future attacks.
The Stanford Institute for International Studies and the World Affairs Council of Northern California co-sponsored the well-attended event, which also attracted a handful of protesters, including two women who were escorted from the hall by police when they refused to stop shouting during the talk. Most of the students and area residents in the audience gave Zelikow a standing ovation at the end of his 75-minute presentation.
Zelikow, a history professor and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, vividly recounted the events of Sept. 11. He then discussed the origins of the attacks and outlined how the U.S. government must be reformed to meet the terrorist threats of the 21st century.
"It is often said that hindsight has 20/20 vision," Zelikow said. "Actually, hindsight is blinding -- it is blinding because the path of what happened is so brightly lit that everything else is cast that much more deeply into shadow."
Zelikow said the "new kind of war" that manifested itself on Sept. 11, 2001, actually started years earlier. Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization responsible for the attacks, and its perversion of Islam "is the product of a long-festering crisis in the Arab and Muslim world," he said, which is reflected in its struggle to come to terms with modernity, the failure of solutions -- such as secular nationalism -- and the ability of al Qaeda to exploit a desperate social situation. Unlike other terrorist groups, Zelikow said, al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, are internationalist in outlook: "His agenda was the United States."
Zelikow gave stark details of what unfolded on Sept. 11 and how and why America was completely unprepared for such an attack. The fact that all of the hijackers got through security at the airports, even though 10 of the 19 men were identified for special screening, was not the result of good fortune, he said. "They had trained and practiced," he said. "They went 19 for 19."
Zelikow described the fate of United Airlines Flight 93 in detail because, despite repeated setbacks, the passengers successfully revolted, forcing the hijackers to carry out their contingency plan and crash the plane into a field in southern Pennsylvania, thereby preventing it from reaching its intended target of either the U.S. Capitol or the White House. "The last thing the passengers did was take a vote on how to proceed, which I thought was a distinctively American thing to do," he said. "The terrorists wanted to destroy one of the great symbols of the American republic."
According to Zelikow, the path leading up to 9/11 was marked by failures of imagination, policy, institutional capabilities and management. He blamed the intelligence community for failing to pull together threads of existing evidence to paint a comprehensive picture of the looming threat. For example, in the summer of 2001, the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Civil Aviation Security considered the possibility of suicide hijacking but rejected it as unlikely because it would "represent few opportunities for dialogue," Zelikow recounted. "The mindset was hijacking for hostages."
Such failures of imagination allowed the terrorists to prepare for their attacks with impunity. "We found that nothing that America did in its counterterrorism policy even delayed the attack," he said.
In looking forward, Zelikow outlined the commission's strategy concerning how to attack terrorists and their organizations, prevent the continued growth of Islamist terrorism, and protect against and prepare for possible future attacks. Referring to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he said, "We have shown the world too much the face of American anger, and we need to balance that with the face of American hope."
Zelikow said the government needs to be reorganized to meet future challenges. As the executive summary of the commission's report states: "To implement [the strategy] will require a government better organized than the one that exists today, with its national security institutions designed half a century ago to win the Cold War. Americans should not settle for incremental, ad hoc adjustments to a system created a generation ago for a world that no longer exists."
The commission has proposed the creation of a National Counterterrorism Center that would borrow the joint, unified command concept adopted by the U.S. military in the 1980s. This would be applied to a civilian agency, combining the joint intelligence function alongside operations work, the report says.
According to Zelikow, such an agency, led by a "national intelligence director," would "prepare us for a long-running conflict in which we will be learning to live with risk and cope with a different kind of era in world politics with strategies sustainable for the long haul." In response to a question, Zelikow rejected the potential risks associated with concentrating too much power in one person. "If you don't have security, you won't have liberty," he said. "The surest way to protect civil liberties is to have security."