Imagining something much worse than London

Fighting terrorism

Jul 14th 2005 WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

The unwieldy Department of Homeland Security has a timely reorganisation, aimed at focusing on the most dangerous threats

THE bombing of the London Underground last week prompted an outpouring of sympathy from Americans for their British allies. It also jolted many Americans into fretting about their own security. How vulnerable are they?

Optimists think the danger is overdone. No significant act of terrorism has been carried out on American soil since September 11th 2001. That assault spurred vigilance. Passengers wishing to board aircraft must now queue to remove their shoes. Tougher cockpit doors keep would-be hijackers away from the controls. Stricter immigration rules, such as the requirement that young foreign males must reveal every country they have visited in the past ten years, screen out potential terrorists before they reach American territory.

Meanwhile, thanks to American military action abroad, the terrorists have lost their base in Afghanistan and are so busy blowing people up in Iraq that they supposedly cannot find time to blow people up in America. As George Bush reiterated in a speech at the FBI academy this week: “We're fighting the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the world so we do not have to face them here at home.”

Pessimists have an alternative explanation for the lack of a domestic sequel to September 11th. Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations notes that al-Qaeda has “made clear that it wants to carry out a more devastating attack than those on New York and Washington”.
Launching such an attack requires time. The reason the terrorists have not picked off easy targets in America, Mr Flynn told Congress in April, is the risk of being arrested before they can commit something “truly catastrophic”. After the London bombings, a poll found that 55% of Americans thought a terror attack on the United States likely in the next several weeks. Last month, only 35% thought so.

On July 13th, Michael Chertoff, Mr Bush's new homeland security secretary, announced a shake-up of his sprawling department. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in 2002. It involved the full or partial merger of 22 separate agencies, bureaus and offices to form a super-ministry with 180,000 staff to protect the homeland from terrorism and natural disasters.

Even friendly critics charge that the DHS is “weighed down with bureaucratic layers”, “rife with turf warfare” and “lack[ing] a structure for strategic thinking and policymaking,” as the pro-Bush Heritage Foundation put it last year. Mr Chertoff, who took over the DHS in February, appears to agree. “Our department must drive improvement with a sense of urgency,” he said this week. “Our enemy constantly changes and adapts, so we as a department must be nimble and decisive.”

Nimbleness would not, at first glance, be something you would associate with the new organisation he unveiled (see diagram). But bear in mind that the last organogram was even worse. And also that he has bullied through changes.

To co-ordinate the gathering and analysis of intelligence, he is creating a new post of “chief intelligence officer” for the DHS. And he is also forcing the department to focus more on the most serious risks.

Despite last week's horrors in London, preventing conventional bomb attacks on subways is only a middling priority. The system's vulnerability is so obvious that it is the butt of dark jokes: “Unreleased Harry Potter book more secure than US trains” was a recent headline in the Onion, a satirical magazine. But a conventional bomb on a train kills relatively few people and airport-style security checks on subways are impractical.

Mr Chertoff is more exercised by the threat of chemical, biological and nuclear attacks. These are hard to execute, but could have catastrophic consequences. A crude nuclear device or efficiently spread biological pathogen could kill tens of thousands. Terrorists would not necessarily need to produce their own unconventional weapons. They could, for example, blow up a chemical plant or a train carrying toxins through a city.

To help him figure out how to ward off such ghastly threats, Mr Chertoff wants to establish a new department-wide policy office. He also plans to appoint a chief medical officer, to deal with biological terror. And he plans to oversee a new (but previously announced) Domestic Nuclear Detection Office. He said he hoped Congress would stump up the money to fund new technology to thwart nuclear threats.

Concentrating on the most high-profile threats is wise, argues Clark Kent Ervin, a homeland security expert at the Aspen Institute, a think-tank. No government can protect citizens against all risks, so it makes sense to focus on the worst ones. Besides, the terrorists seem to calculate that the more spectacular an outrage they perpetrate, the greater its power to intimidate democracies and recruit more jihadis.

But Americans who live far from Washington, DC, or a nuclear power plant also want to be protected. The Senate voted this week to allocate to rural states a larger-than-planned share of the homeland security budget, on the ground that no one knows what the terrorists will do next. The senators have a point. An attack on a shopping mall in Idaho might scare more Americans than one on the White House.

This week, Mr Chertoff proposed several concrete ideas for reducing specific risks. Currently, only 5% of containers entering American ports are inspected; Mr Chertoff wants to gather more data about where exactly each cargo has come from, and to deploy more radiation detectors at ports to scan containers.

He has also proposed more “precise” screening in airports. Rather than searching millions of people randomly, the system will “automatically clear low-risk travellers” so that security personnel can “focus on a smaller and more distinct pool of passengers that might pose a threat”. However he phrases it, this is likely to mean fewer pointless searches of grandmothers and Buddhists, and an even rougher time for young men called Muhammad. That will upset civil libertarians but reassure most travellers.

The London bombings seem slightly to have increased America's willingness to trade civil liberties for security. Indeed, many Americans are baffled by Europe's laxer attitude to such things as allowing radical imams to subsist on welfare while preaching the overthrow of the states that shelter them. A poll by the Guardian last year found that 13% of British Muslims think that further terrorist attacks on America would be justified. Most have British passports and so may enter America without a visa, notes Peter Bergen, an expert on al-Qaeda at the New America Foundation. How long will that last?

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