Crush the Cell

Campus Report ^ | May 23, 2008 | Ben Giles

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Crush the Cell

by: Ben Giles, May 23, 2008

Michael Sheehan served tours of duty in Panama and El Salvador. He worked in the U.S. government and the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Throughout his career, he fought on the frontlines of the war on terror. Just don’t tell him that’s what it is.

“I don’t consider it a war,” said Sheehan. “It’s counter-terrorism.”

Sheehan, former NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Counter-Terrorism, argues that a war isn’t going to suppress terrorist cells linked to al Qaeda. The strategic intelligence and counter-terrorism efforts can accomplish U.S. goals.

Sheehan is the author of the new book Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves. At the Heritage Foundation he outlined his analysis of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts before and after September 11, 2001. Sheehan seeks “a rationale dialogue about terrorism and counter-terrorism, without the politics involved.”

Prior to 9/11, officials did not view al Qaeda as a terrorist threat. Sheehan cites the suicide bombings of multiple U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998 and of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 as two major attacks that should have triggered U.S. interest in al Qaeda.

He points to the third presidential debate leading up to the 2000 election between nominees Al Gore and George W. Bush as a barometer for the nation’s interest in the attacks; the USS Cole had been struck only five days prior to the debate.

Still, conversations at the debate were bereft of any mention of al Qaeda.

“They had questions about terrorism and questions about the Middle East and none of them mentioned al Qaeda, none of them mentioned the Cole,” said Sheehan....

[Cacique]

Terrorism and terrorist organizations cannot exist in a vacuum. They exist because state actors fund and give refuge to these organizations and use them as an extension of foreign policy. It was true in the days of the Soviet Union and it is true today in the days of IslamoFascism. To that end we are in an unconventional war. It appears that this individual sees terrorism as merely a police matter rather than the fact that we are at war not with Al Qaeda itself but with the state actors that back it, supply it, arm it and give it refuge.