Posted on 07/09/2006 9:22:35 AM PDT by prairiebreeze
That was BVW.
(But the confusion is understandable.)
However, I still disagree strongly with the idea that the President needs to have Congressional hand-holding for all intelligence activities. Otherwise, why not just abolish the executive branch and make all of the decisions in Congress? The Founder's answered that question by creating the presidency...
Thanks. I don't know how I missed that...
It is the smell of their crushed and mangled bodies that has stayed with me these many years.
It was late October 1983 and I was the Marine Corps’ liaison to the FBI forensics team that had traveled from Washington, DC, to Frankfurt in what was then West Germany. The three-man team was there to identify the 241 Marines and Navy corpsmen killed by a Hezbollah suicide bomber on October 23rd in Beirut. Fatally restrictive rules of engagement signed off by a negligent Marine Corps commandant and other bureaucrats had gotten the Marines and corpsmen killed. My job was to do whatever the FBI team needed me to do to make their job easier.
The bodies were being kept in the U.S. Army’s V (5th) Corps morgue, just down the street from the Army’s 97th General Hospital, where many of the wounded were being treated. The morgue building was not designed for mass casualties, so there was a lot of improvisation in properly handling the bodies and dealing with the logistical and operational issues so many dead men presented. When I wasn’t at the morgue, I was at the hospital tending to the needs of the wounded who were conscious and those of the families who had flown in from the States to be with their sons. But regardless of my many and diverse daily duties in that mission, which you might think would keep my mind fully occupied so that peripheral observations would be kept to a minimum, the singular odor of decomposing bodies is one that, once experienced, you never forget.
Western Europe in those days was infested with all manner of terrorists and attacks were commonplace. The old Baeder-Meinhof Gang had morphed itself into the Red Army Faction (RAF). ETA was busy with bombings, arson and shootings across Spain. In Italy, the Red Brigades were on a wild kidnaping and killing spree. The Belgium-based Communist Combatant Cells (CCC) were spreading their message of deadly communist ideology. Action Directe out of France was branching out and would, two years later, join with the RAF to attack the U.S. Air Force Base at Rhein-Main. The butchery in Northern Ireland was unending, thanks to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The Japanese Red Army (JRA) was conducting attacks not only in Europe but seemingly everywhere. And a multitude of Muslim terrorist groups, following in trace of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (the notorious PLO and its al-Fatah faction), were on a rampage, with groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - Special Command, Black September, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Abu Nidal Organization, a nasty freelancer with the nickname Carlos the Jackal, and others, were sowing destruction sometimes seemingly at will.
I was living with a German family, renting the third floor of their home in Frankfurt. This arrangement somewhat reduced my vulnerability when it came to attacks, as I was not living in any sort of U.S. government facility. I drove a German car with German license plates, dressed like a German, lived with Germans, shopped in German stores and ate in German restaurants frequented by Germans. I even spoke some German, unfortunately I am told with a “Down East” Maine accent. I had adapted to the environment and wondered which of the mélange of aforementioned terrorist groups would be able to adapt to survive. As it were, although remnants remain in some cases, today many of these groups are either gone or have been shoved aside (such as with al-Fatah after Arafat’s long-overdue death but highly entertaining funeral) according to many terrorism analysts by new players.
It is those comparatively new players, plus the resilient Hezbollah and PFLP, we are at war with today. The 21st Century’s players on the battlefield of asymmetric warfare have learned from their predecessors’ failures to evolve and adapt. Today’s terrorists have learned that he who upgrades his aegis to defend against an also-evolving opponent and strikes at unexpected, soft targets using unconventional means, can sometimes win the day.
Global asymmetric warfare is a contest of who can find and strike his opponent’s critical weaknesses and who can move more quickly and effectively to prevent such strikes. This form of warfare differs radically from modern traditional warfare in that one side wears no uniforms, frequently has no government and intentionally attacks undefended civilian targets in violation of international law, with the latter being their standard modus operandi.
This premise was born out in June 2006 in a tale out of the Liberty City region of metropolitan Miami that riveted Americans to their television screens, with seven Muslim jihadists, most of whom were American citizens, being arrested for being part of an Islamic terrorist cell whose members had sworn their allegiance to al Qaeda. The seven had hoped to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago, U.S. government buildings and offices around Miami, and other targets.
FBI Director Robert Mueller, in a statement the day after the arrests were made:
“These extremists are self-recruited, self-trained, and self-executing. They answer not to a particular leader but to an ideology. In short, they operate under the radar. And that makes their detection that much more difficult.”
They evolved and adapted. The question I had asked myself back in 1983 had again been answered, as it had time and again in the years between.
But now I had a new question, which I first asked myself seconds after the second jet struck the doomed World Trade Center: Could America evolve and adapt quickly enough to the terrorists’ tactics?
Two months later, although I already suspected I knew the answer, the stark truth came to me while standing in the security line at Denver International Airport, when I heard repeated complaints from various passengers regarding having to stand in said security line. I knew then America had a serious problem. Reinforcement of this disconcerting affirmation would soon come on a daily basis, not from understandably ignorant and impatient air travelers, but from our own elected officials with names like Murtha, Kennedy and Kerry. These cretins and their cohorts on the United States Supreme Court and in the Congress, Democratic Party, leftist media and Hollywood, would purely for political purposes demonstrate their treacherous willingness to convince Americans that America’s wartime evolution strategy should be analogous to that fabled Darwinian champion, the dodo.
--From the terrorism evolution chapter of my upcoming book
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