The stunning military collapse of the Taliban regime over the past five days has dominated news coverage of the war against terrorism. It has silenced the “laptop bombardiers” of the news media who had already begun to call the military campaign a failure, and appears to have significantly increased the chances that U.S. and British Special Forces commandos on the ground in Afghanistan may soon locate and destroy (if not capture) the leadership of the Taliban and the al Qaeda terrorist network.

But just as the combat operations appeared to have bogged down in the weeks before the Northern Alliance – aided by U.S. strategic bombers and tactical fighters – broke through the Taliban lines and quickly overran the northern half of Afghanistan this week, it remains possible that the pace of the war could again slow down, particularly if the enemy manages to go to ground in the extensive cave complexes of Afghanistan. In like vein, the arrest in Spain on Tuesday of nine men suspected of comprising an al Qaeda terrorist cell reinforces the warnings repeatedly given by senior Bush administration officials that the war against terror – both overseas and at home – is far from over.

One late-breaking development that has Washington and the legal community abuzz is President Bush’s executive order released on Nov. 13 declaring that any al Qaeda terrorists or their supporters who are apprehended will face special military tribunals rather than the federal court system. This is a drastic – but legal – tactic last used by the Roosevelt administration to try German saboteurs captured inside the United States after being infiltrated ashore by German U-Boats at Long Island and Florida in June 1942. The full text of the presidential executive order is included in this edition of DefenseWatch.

I call particular attention to the article by Ziad K. Abdelnour that originally appeared in the Middle East Research Bulletin on the growing information pointing to a connection between the al Qaeda terrorist hijackers and the government of Iraq. A thorough and clear recapitulation of evidence that has emerged in the weeks since Sept. 11, Abdelnour’s article strongly suggests that if the Bush administration remains true to its announced policy of responding to terrorists and any state supporters, the air and ground war in Afghanistan may well prove to have been only a minor prelude to the real battle.

This week’s edition has a number of interesting articles on various facets of the current situation, including David Hackworth’s analysis of our nation’s experience in the early months of World War II and how it compares with the counter-terrorism fight today. Also, DefenseWatch editors Robert G. Williscroft and J. David Galland offer two interesting views on the ongoing effort to increase airline safety and security, while contributing editor Matthew Dodd offers a thought-provoking essay on ethics and the escalating homeland security effort.

Last week, I began soliciting viewpoints from active-duty, reserve and National Guard personnel on how the ongoing war is affecting their unit’s readiness and material condition. We have already received a number of pertinent replies and publish two of them this week.

And finally, my thanks to the folks at www.wordsmith.org, who maintain a powerful and easy-to-use anagram computer. I was able to crack the code on Osama bin Laden and many other players in the ongoing drama, discovering some amazing (and funny) hidden meanings in the names and words.

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Table of Contents

Hack’s Target For The Week: Batten Down the Hatches on the Home Front

By David H. Hackworth

“Can we win this war?”

That's the question that has been tossed at me repeatedly over the past two weeks as Eilhys and I traveled around this anxious country talking to citizens ranging from Starbucks baristas and their clients at New York City's LaGuardia Airport, to a large crowd in Nashville's Oprey Mills Shopping Mall, to folks who stopped and talked with us on southern California sidewalks, in restaurants and TV and movie studios.

Clearly there's a torrent of concern and confusion coming from worried Americans facing their first war on their own turf and trying to figure out the score overseas. All wanted to know the real deal and most feel close to clueless, perhaps because much of our media seems to be measuring this war with a World War II ruler.

But if we dial back to 12/7/41 and World Trade Center I – the Pearl Harbor attack – we see that things were grim then and quickly got worse. Most of our Pacific Fleet was at the bottom of the harbor. Much of our very small and green Army was still running around the boonies like kids in a back lot going “bang bang” with wooden sticks for rifles and machine-guns, while those who'd lucked out and had real weapons were toting the worn-out stuff their dads used in 1918.

On maneuvers, our fighter jocks – with just a fraction of the combat aircraft of their Nazi and Imperial Japanese foes – were dropping flour sacks as simulated bombs against trucks that General George Patton designated as enemy armored vehicles by having “tank” scrawled in chalk on their tarpaulins. In 1942, in the Philippines, our forces were totally defeated – while the survivors were death-marched into inhumanly brutal POW camps.

Then, at Midway and the Solomon Islands, the Navy and Marine Corps won their first fights but lost most of our torpedo attack aircraft, about a third of what was left of our Pacific Fleet, and a lot of Marines and soldiers went down by bullets and bugs. Next, our Army got decked in Africa in its first big battle.

Not only were our Armed Forces not ready to fight, our opponent's multi-million man Army had conquered most of Europe, Asia and Africa with the most formidable military machine the world had ever seen. Only an unprepared USA and a beleaguered Great Britain – which was being blitzed night and day by Nazi bombers – stood in their way to stop them from conquering the world.

We picked ourselves up off the mat, rolled up our sleeves and built a 13-million strong Citizen's Army from scratch while providing our British, Soviet, Chinese and other allies with war materials to stop the jack-booted barbarians blasting away at their front gates.

Three years later, the Fascists hoisted the white flag and then our victorious forces set down their rifles, picked up shovels and picks and helped their former enemies dig themselves out of the rubble and rebuild into prosperous and decent democratic nations.

Today, we've had the good fortune to go into our first fight in the 21st Century with the most powerful military force in the world, including both a world-class aviation arm and Special Ops troops who – as their brilliant and brave performance in Afghanistan testifies – are as good as those boys get.

In Round One, the only hits we've taken so far have been a couple of helicopter crashes, and our Taliban opponent in Afghanistan is already coming apart faster than a wet paper sack filled with rocks. We're so squared away on the military front that last week the USS Enterprise sailed back to Norfolk in glory after successfully bombing the terrorists even deeper into their Afghan caves.

But what the stalwart sailors had on their minds was Main Street USA. It's time to batten down the domestic hatches, they're saying – and get serious about defending our home shores with the same urgency our country's bringing to the battlefield they just left. These smart swabbies know more terrorist sucker punches are on the way and that all the rhetoric aside, security at home is still loose as a goose.

Can we win this war? Bet your sweet patootie! But we'll win it with less civilian casualties only if Ridge & Co. get real and get moving.

Http://www.hackworth.com is the address of David Hackworth's home page. Sign in for the free weekly Defending America column at his Web site. Send mail to P.O. Box 11179, Greenwich, CT 06831.

Table of Contents

ARTICLE 01 – Mounting Evidence of Iraqi Link to Terror Attacks

By Ziad K. Abdelnour

Two weeks before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein reportedly put his military on its highest state of alert since the 1991 Gulf War. According to the London-based Sunday Telegraph, the Iraqi leader even took the unusual step of moving his two wives, Sajida and Samira, from Baghdad to an undisclosed location in the family's hometown of Tikrit, 100 miles to the north (see “Army alert by Saddam points to Iraqi role,” The Sunday Telegraph, London, Sept. 23, 2001.)

Saddam's precautions were hardly unwarranted. A growing body of circumstantial evidence indicates that Iraq may have participated in plotting the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The most striking evidence linking Baghdad to the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks is that the presumed ringleader of the suspected hijackers, Mohamed Atta, met twice with Iraqi intelligence operatives in the Czech Republic. According to senior Czech officials quoted in the Czech daily Hospodarske Noviny and The Wall Street Journal, Atta traveled from Hamburg, Germany, to Prague in June 2000 and met with Iraqi intelligence agents at Baghdad's embassy there, which has long been under constant surveillance by the Czech authorities.

After the meeting, he flew on to the United States, where he began flight lessons the following month. Atta had made a previous attempt to enter the country on May 30, but wasn't allowed to leave the airport upon arriving in Prague because he lacked a visa (see “Hijack Suspect met Iraqi Agent in June 2000,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 4 2000).

Atta made a third trip to Prague in April 2001 and met with Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani, the chief of consular affairs at the Iraqi embassy there. Later that month, Ani was expelled by the Czech authorities for “engaging in activities beyond

his diplomatic duties” after he was observed photographing the Radio Free Europe building in Prague, which had begun broadcasting anti-Saddam programs into Iraq in 1998.

Ani had been under surveillance at the time as a suspected intelligence operative because he “was never present at any diplomatic event,” said the Czech Foreign Ministry official who expelled him, Hynek Kmonicek, in an interview with Newsweek. “It's suspicious,” said Kmonicek. “Why would a diplomat with no diplomatic

duties meet with a student of architecture? How is it possible they even know each other?" (see “Hard Questions About an Iraqi Connection,” Newsweek, Oct. 29, 2001).

Czech intelligence officials suspect that Ani may have provided Atta with fake passports for the 19 hijackers that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.

During his second visit to Prague, Atta also reportedly met with Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, Farouk Hijazi, a former brigadier-general in the General Intelligence Directorate (GID). Hijazi, who was recalled to Baghdad prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, is known to have traveled to Kandahar, Afghanistan to meet with Osama bin Laden in December 1998 (see Newsweek, Oct. 15, 2001). Hijazi is also believed to have met with bin Laden in Sudan prior to the latter's expulsion from the country in 1996.

According to the London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), Hijazi and Brigadier-General Habib Ma'amouri reportedly developed plans for hijacking civilian airliners and crashing them into civilian targets during the mid-1990s at the GID Special Operations Branch in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.

Two Iraqi defectors have corroborated this claim. A former Iraqi military officer, Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, said he was in charge of training an elite special forces team, “designed to plan and conduct operations against U.S. and British interests around the world” at Salman Pak. Using a Boeing 707 parked inside the complex, Alami's team practiced hijacking planes without weapons. He also said that another team of non-Iraqis underwent similar training at the same camp.

A second defector gave a similar description of the camp, and recounted meeting some of the non-Iraqi trainees, whom he described as deeply religious, when a group of five Saudis and an Egyptian helped him move his car and jump-start the engine (see The Wall Street Journal – Europe, Oct. 22, 2001).

There have also been reports that at least three high-ranking Iraqi intelligence officials have visited Pakistan over the last four months to meet with representatives of al-Qa'ida (see The Sunday Telegraph, London, Sept. 23, 2001).

In addition to evidence linking Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks, there are indications that Baghdad may be responsible for the anthrax attacks that have occurred over the past month in the United States. The anthrax spores that were found in Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle's office earlier this month were treated with sophisticated chemical additives that enable the spores to remain suspended in the air. They could not have been developed in a cave. In fact, according to a report in The Washington Post, only three nations are believed to be capable of producing these chemicals: the United States, Russia and Iraq (see “Additive Made Spores Deadlier,” The Washington Post, Oct. 25, 2001).

Iraq, for the record, has vehemently denied involvement in either the Sept. 11 attacks or the anthrax attacks.

As more and more evidence of Iraqi complicity in the terror attacks in the U.S. comes to light, officials in the Bush administration remain polarized into two camps. The first, headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, has categorically rejected suggestions that Iraq may have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. Powell and others have declined to name Iraq as a suspected sponsor of the attacks, ostensibly because sufficient evidence of its involvement has not come to light. In fact, it appears that fear of disrupting the Bush administration's anti-terrorism coalition is the primary concern at the State Department.

A dissident faction within the administration, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby, a key aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, have advocated expanding the war on terror to include Iraq. Wolfowitz and others feel that the attacks could not have been launched without state sponsorship and believe that, in any event, Iraq constitutes a much greater long-term threat to U.S. national security than bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida network. In their view, the elimination of Iraq's clandestine nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs, which have proceeded unhindered since the 1998 expulsion of UN weapons inspectors, should be a top priority in the near future.

While President Bush has clearly avoided pointing the finger at Iraq, he has nevertheless alluded repeatedly to the fact that the war on terror will not necessarily be confined to Afghanistan. Earlier this month, U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte delivered a letter to the Security Council stating that American self-defense could require “further actions with respect to other organizations and some states.”

While Iraq has been put on the back burner for the time being, military action against Baghdad has not been ruled out. It appears that the Bush administration is waiting until it has accumulated incontrovertible evidence of Iraqi involvement in terror attacks against the United States before shifting the focus of its war on terror.

In fact, it appears that some high-ranking figures in the Bush administration may be quietly investigating claims made by Laurie Mylroie that Iraq masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The most incriminating evidence produced by Mylroie in her book, Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America , concerns the identity of Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani convicted of masterminding the 1993 attack. Yousef fled the United States after the attack using a passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani resident of Kuwait.

According to Mylroie, Iraqi intelligence altered files at Kuwait's interior ministry after the 1990 invasion in order to provide Yousef with a false identity.

Although the U.S. Justice Department has long maintained that Yousef was, in fact, Abdul Basit, earlier this month former CIA director James Woolsey reportedly flew to London to determine whether Yousef's fingerprints match those of Abdul Basit, who lived in Britain during the 1980s. Although CIA and State Department officials are said to have been outraged by Woolsey's trip, the fact that he arrived on board a U.S. government plane would appear to indicate that his investigation has been sanctioned by some in the Bush administration (see Knight-Ridder News Service, Oct., 10, 2001).

Some who advocate a major military campaign against Iraq have cautioned against putting off action into the distant future. A military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein will undoubtedly be costly and therefore necessitate strong support from the American people. According to the results of a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Oct. 25, 74 percent of Americans now believe that the United States should expand the war on terrorism by targeting Saddam Hussein and 56 percent “strongly” favor such a policy. This degree of unqualified support for war against Iraq will not last forever.

Ziad K. Abdelnour is executive director of the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, a monthly publication of the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon at www.meib.org.

SPECIAL FOCUS: Airline Safety and Security

Table of Contents

ARTICLE 02 – Airline Safety: Simple Steps for Better Security

By Robert G. Williscroft

In the real world we live in, what is the obvious solution to airline security? The answer is easy: Don't let any bad guys or bad stuff on any aircraft. Now all we need do is implement this solution.

In my submarine days, the fleet developed a simple, elegant solution for ensuring that workers who welded on a submarine pressure hull did their best. When the sub performed its first test dive after a shipyard period, all the guys who welded on the pressure hull were guests for that dive. Sure, we tested every weld, but we added this extra safety step to make sure. And you know the welders did their best.

What are an aircraft's vulnerabilities?

* Repair and maintenance;

* Hold baggage inspection and loading;

* Carry-on baggage;

* The passengers;

* The crew;

* The aircraft itself, including security of the cockpit, emergency exits, etc.;

* External factors such as being rammed by a small plane, etc.

The crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in New York on Monday is still under investigation and very little is yet known about the cause, except that two of the Airbus A300 engines and the tail apparently fell off prior to the aircraft impacting the ground.

Excuse me: fell off?

We will, of course discover more about the real cause of this tragic event, but were all airlines to implement a policy of requiring a member of a repair crew for any significant repair to fly on the aircraft shortly thereafter, you know repairs would be done with the utmost attention to detail.

Since most flights typically have one or more empty seats, the FAA could establish this policy: All personnel associated with any aspect of prepping a plane for flight would rotate randomly every one or two months to a flight list, and would be required to take a flight on short notice.

When you don't know when you might be required to fly, or what flight you might be required to take, I suspect you will regularly ensure that your particular responsibility is done to the best of your ability.

Obviously, all hold baggage must be inspected. That we are not already doing this is astonishing. We live in the digital age. If an appropriate program doesn't exist, we should create one to conduct preliminary inspection of x-ray images for all hold baggage. We should also “sniff” all hold baggage for explosives. Items that don't pass initial screening should be diverted to inspection units manned by well-trained personnel, and if necessary, are inspected by hand.

Ditto for carry-on baggage. By letting computer programs do initial screening, we can shorten long security lines and move them more quickly. We can match passengers and baggage by using luggage tags and claim tickets containing computer chips that register the presence of the owner passenger onboard the aircraft. If a passenger is missing, we can then remove the offending luggage before take-off.

Passenger screening is more complex, but nearly instantaneous criminal checks are possible by linking identity determining units such as fingerprint or iris pattern readers to FBI databases. This won't find a mole, but will absolutely identify an identified bad guy. Sky Marshals can handle anything that slips through this initial screening.

We can let the airlines handle crew and aircraft. Soon enough, all crewmembers will have been screened and double screened, and cockpit doors will have been replaced. Arming crewmembers with lethal or non-lethal weapons has defenders and detractors. I think it probably is a good idea, on balance, at least for the cockpit crew. I am a bit leery of putting a weapon in the hands of a relatively inexperienced flight attendant who might not be able to bring her weapon to bear against a stronger male hijacker. Arming the cockpit crew, however, and giving them some form of remote surveillance over the entire aircraft makes sense.

The FAA and the homeland security mechanisms being put into place will have to deal with potential external threats like small planes flying into passenger jets, and possible Stinger-style missiles launched by terrorists.

The suggestions presented here cost a lot of money, and I have not addressed who does what. The obvious responsible party for security before an aircraft is boarded is the airport – not the airline companies, not the feds, not the state. An airport can set up appropriate security perimeters and can standardize all inspections, coordinate the personnel and equipment, and is far better positioned than any other unit to do this. The required equipment is very expensive, and untrained minimum wage personnel will not be able to use this equipment effectively. Initially, the federal government should supply funds to purchase and install necessary equipment and train appropriately skilled personnel.

In the long run, however, the FAA (or whoever ultimately regulates such things in today's over-regulated world) must establish a ticket surcharge on every ticket sold. This surcharge would not migrate into the federal or state financing black hole. Rather, it would be collected into a national pool and used directly to reimburse initial federal expenditures, and then to finance all further expenses at every airport in America.

Initially, I envision a surcharge of $25, but this probably should be the subject of a short and intense study to ensure that sufficient funds are made available to do the job. The bottom line is, if you fly, you should pay for your own security.

Taken together, we can remarkably improve maintenance and repair actions. We can dramatically increase safety in baggage handling by requiring those involved with these actions to fly randomly on aircraft they service. And we can apply current technology to its best advantage to ensure that no unauthorized object or person boards an aircraft.

Robert G. Williscroft is DefenseWatch Navy Editor.