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Posted on 09/11/2001 4:03:20 PM PDT by anymouse

The Bush Administration should drop its preoccupation with missile-defense spending and focus its dollars on combating terrorism in the wake of at least two apparently successful attacks on major U.S. centers this morning, top Capitol Hill Democrats say.

"We've got to get with it," declared Marty Meehan (D-Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee's R&D panel. "I would hope and think that every member of Congress would recognize that we need to shift our national security priorities and focus and make a commitment to fighting terrorism, not just with rhetoric, but with our resources."

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee, is less concerned about a missile fired at the U.S., "especially a missile that has a return address on it, than I am about coordinated terrorist attacks like this where we don't know whether they're domestic, foreign or what they are."

Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO commander, told the CNN cable network that this was a "coordinated attack," adding that "there's only one group that has ever indicated that it has this kind of ability and that's [Saudi dissident and suspected international terrorist] Osama bin Laden. So that's obviously the first suspicion.

"There have been many threats made against U.S., threats of terrorism. There is no doubt that for a long time there have been groups that have tried to target the U.S....In this case, we didn't have the information and weren't able to take the action to break it up."

That shows how the U.S. needs to "do a better job" of monitoring terrorists and terrorist groups, Meehan said, which should mean shifting resources from national missile defense to fighting terrorism, which he describes as a "much greater threat to national security."

"We're talking about $100 billion for a national missile-defense system," Meehan said. "We ought to take those resources and put them into high-tech surveillance technology....We need to find the technologies that don't presently exist to fight terrorism."

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