A couple of recent articles provide a good reminder that terrorism can't be considered as just a threat from Evil Muslim Heathen America-Haters, as the Bush Administration seems to prefer. Domestic terrorism is a real problem, and not only in the United States. Remember the ricin attacks of recent months? The anthrax attacks of 2001 which our crack Attorney General has been unable to solve? Those were very likely domestic terrorism incidents.
Spain's Civil Guard (national police) just arrested two suspects with 536 kilos of explosives: La detención de dos etarras impide una masacre en Madrid en plena campaña electoral El Mundo 02/29/04. They are believed to be members of the Basque separatist group ETA, a group that mainly operates within Spain itself. The Civil Guard believes they were on there was to carry out a deadly bombing in Madrid, the specific target possibly being an industrial park area that includes two large hotels. One of the captured ETA members reportedly said the main target was the newspaper La Razón, whose main office is in the area.
ETA has made such attacks before, as the article notes, such as one in Zaragosa in 1987 (11 dead) and another in Barcelona in 1991 (9 dead). ETA is trying to make its presence known during the current national election campaign (parliamentary elections are in March), although it's not clear to me exactly what effect they expect.
The other article is this AP item about a new FBI review of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. They are going to further pursue leads suggesting that a far-right group known as the Aryan Republian Army was involved in Timothy McVeigh's bomb plot.
While our professional warmongers like Richard Perle promote the "war on terrorism" as a justification for making conventional war on country after country, people who actually care about dealing with the terrorism problem - which hopefully includes law enforcement at all levels - need to take a different view.
5 comments:
There is a very good reason this is not transparent to the general public. If the public can see what we are doing, then don't you suppose that terrorist can see it too?
Your assumption that conventional war is our only effort couldn't be more wrong.
Obviously, you are unaware of the counter-terrorism efforts that Federal, State, Municipal and other Law Enforcement Agencies are engaged in, and unaware of the information sharing that goes on between these LEAs. Military and Federal counter-terrorism experts are consistently engaged in cross-training and information sharing in the effort to combat terrorism abroad AND here at home.
The question still remains: why hasn't the Justice Department broken the anthrax case yet? From what is already known publicly, there is a fairly restricted number of people with access to that particular strain. And the handling of the case of a far-right group in Texas being discovered last year with a cyanide bomb does indicate that the federal emphasis is overwhelmingly of foreign-based terrorism. - Bruce
Perhaps this is because the overwhelming majority of terrorists are foreign-based.
Timmy McVeigh wasn't. The Texas cyanide-bomb group isn't. The anthrax and ricin attackers likely weren't. The point of the post is that combatting terrorism is primarily a national and international law-enforcement task. For the most part, conventional wars are not the optimal solution, to put it mildly. Especially when we've found more "weapons of mass destruction" (cyanide bombs) held by a terrorist group in Texas than in Iraq. - Bruce
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