Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy

Transcript

RON NESSEN: Good morning, I'm Ron Nessen. I want to welcome you to the Brookings Institution, and welcome you to this briefing on "Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy." As many of you know, next week the State Department will release its annual report on terrorism around the world. And at about the same time Brookings will be publishing this new book called Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, by Paul Pillar, which deals with many of the issues that will be covered in the State Department annual report and has some recommendations for improving U.S. policy toward terrorism.
Paul is with us today and is going to begin today's briefing by talking about the State Department report and some of his ideas spelled out in the book. We also have an expert panel, three people who have been involved in counter-terrorism in various ways. Sitting next to me here is John Parachini who is executive director of the Washington Office of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. On Paul's other side is James Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence, now a partner here in Washington of Shea & Gardner. And at the far end, Patrick Clawson, director for research of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

After Paul has talked a bit about the State Department report and about his book, our panelists will comment on what Paul has said, offer some ideas of their own on U.S. policy towards terrorism and counterterrorism, and we'll have a lively discussion among the panel members. And then we will have time for your participation and your questions. Let me just make one or two other brief announcements before turning this over to Paul.

This briefing is being webcast on the Internet this morning, providing live streaming audio and video of the event. If you would like to participate and your watching this webcast you can send in your questions or comments and we'll try to work them into the conversation this morning. You can email your questions and comments to communications@brookings.edu. The full video and audio of this event will be on the Brookings website, where you can look at it and listen to it afterward. There's a full transcript, of course, and there's a great deal of background information on terrorism and American foreign policy. The Brookings website, you can read it up here, it's at www.brookings.edu.

When it does come time for audience participation we'll have some folks in the audience with microphones. Raise your hand, I'll recognize you, wait for the microphone to reach you, stand up, give your name and affiliation, and then offer your question or comment. So we're very pleased that you're here today. I think that we'll all learn a lot and have a lively discussion. And I'm going to begin by asking Paul Pillar to talk to you about his book and about the forthcoming State Department report.

PAUL PILLAR: Thank you, Ron. Good morning, thank you for coming out.

I need to begin with the disclaimer that even though I'm the only member of this panel who is currently in government service, I'm appearing this morning like my colleagues in an individual capacity. So please don't construe anything that I say or certainly anything in the book as representing a government agency position. And I ask that if you attribute any remarks to me you keep that disclaimer in mind.

I'm certainly not going to spill any beans about the exact contents of the "Patterns'" report, you'll have to attend the State Department's press conference next Monday to find out about that. But the annual report has always been a snapshot of international terrorism over the previous year. It hasn't traditionally been an occasion for the U.S. government to make or announce decisions about changes in policy, about state sponsors or designation of terrorist groups. But it has been an occasion for those kinds of questions to be raised.

So what I'd like to do is just touch on some of the major trends of international terrorism that lie behind what you're going to see in next week's report, and some of the policy issues that they raise, which are ones that come up in the book. And first and foremost of which is simply the persistence of international terrorism as a problem that we're going to continue to face for the indefinite future. And I say that despite the considerable counter-terrorist successes, some of which I'm sure you'll read about in the report next week, that the United States has had: such as arrests and prosecutions, the trials—PanAm 103, the ones in New York, the rolling up of terrorist plots like the so-called millennial plots at the beginning of 2000. Those and many other successes are significant. They are numerous. We shouldn't short-change them.

That said, we can't really say that international terrorism has become less of a problem over the last several years. In fact, in some respects we can point to ways in which it's become a bit more of a problem, especially a tendency throughout the 1990s toward increased lethality. More people getting killed per attack, if you will, in the terrorism that we've seen. That doesn't mean we should say we're losing the war on terrorism. I think that's the wrong metaphor. There isn't a war against terrorism. We're fighting lots of little wars against different groups, different perpetrators.

Think of terrorism more as something that's been with us for centuries. It's going to continue to be with us for some time. We can mitigate it. We can manage it. We can reduce the effects of it, but we can never eliminate it.

Now another major pattern that's going to continue and has been quite prevalent over the last several years, and that I'm sure you'll see in next weeks report, is the status of the United States as target number one of international terrorists. And that has partly to do with things that we really can't change as a super-power. We're the biggest, most prominent target. People hate us because we're the leader of the West. We carry much of the West's baggage, and simply because we are the only superpower.

But it also is a function in part of things that can be changed, with regard to U.S. postures and policies overseas. People react to some of the things we do overseas and get angry about them. And some of the people who get angry resort to terrorism. And it's also partly a matter of just physical vulnerability, when we have an overseas posture. And a reminder of that was the most significant attack last year that affected American lives, the attack on the USS Cole, which as you know, was involved in operations in the Persian Gulf region involving the containment of Iraq.

Now an implication of this is that counter-terrorism is not just a matter of arrests and trials and rolling up plots and security counter-measures. It's at least as much a matter of huge swaths of US foreign policy and what this government and what this country does overseas and says overseas. By saying that I don't mean we should necessarily shy away from any particular deployment or initiative, be it containment of Iraq or anything else, because we're afraid of terrorism.

Rather it means with each such deployment or posture overseas, which may raise terrorism as a possible side effect, careful consideration needs to be given to all of the risks and tradeoffs involved. The risks, as far as vulnerability to terrorism, weighed against whatever it is we hope to accomplish with the particular policy or deployment or posture. Sometimes after making that careful weighing of risks and benefits, perhaps the right decision would be not to go ahead with some initiative, to avoid some situation like the United States got in Lebanon in the 1980s, which became a kind of trap from which we weren't able to extricate ourselves without it appearing to be a defeat at the hands of terrorists, after we had the Marine barracks and our embassy blown up.

Sometimes it will mean just making modifications in a deployment or an initiative. For example, what the US military in Saudi Arabia did after the Khobar bombing in 1996, in which re-deployments were carried out, moving the troops away from where they were vulnerable in the urban areas to more remote desert air bases where it would be simply harder, physically, for terrorists to reach them. And sometimes the right decision may be to just go ahead because there's too much else at stake, too much work to be done despite the risks of terrorist attacks.

Despite the US position as terrorist target number one, something else you ought to reflect on as you read the report next week is how much international terrorism is affecting other people in terms of other non-US citizens being killed or injured. But also reflect on the fact that much of that other terrorism, although it doesn't mean dead Americans, does affect US foreign policy interests in significant ways. In other words, the harm that terrorism poses to US interests is not to be equated with dead American bodies - dead Americans.

Consider for example the very large role that terrorism plays in a number of hot spots around the world, where the US has major interests and has taken a major role in various ways: the Arab-Israeli conflict being the most obvious one. And perhaps Patrick Clawson will wish to address that later on. Colombia, which has had just in terms of sheer numbers, the most international terrorism of any one country in the last couple of years, and where the US has obvious major interests with regard to the counter-narcotics effort. The South Asian subcontinent, the face off in Kashmir, where again numerically international terrorism has been a big part of that conflict, and where the obvious stake not just the United States but the rest of the world has, is warding off a larger Indian-Pakistani conflict, a conflict between two countries with nuclear weapons.

So terrorism is a result of these unsettled conflicts as well as a complication in trying to settle them. One implication of that is that peace processes aimed at settling those conflicts can themselves be an important means of reducing terrorism. And to take it one step further, one of the most effective sources of counter-terrorism measures that the United States may take is to support or promote peace processes that have the potential for resolving conflicts that underlie much of that terrorism in the hot spots I mentioned, as well as many others.

Now this is not an argument that the United States ought to get deeply involved in mediating peace agreements anywhere and everywhere. There are obviously many other considerations. Conflicts may not be ripe for settlement. It's simply that such support for conflict resolution is as much a part of counter-terrorism as security fences or guard forces or arresting and prosecuting terrorists.

Now, another thing to think about when you look at next week's report is how much terrorism is the work of many different groups, many different kinds of groups, with the groups of concern constantly changing, waxing and waning, emerging and dying, merging with each other and separating. It's not a matter of one fixed set of bad guys or groups which, if we could somehow eliminate them, would solve the problem.

Now this raises the issue, which is discussed in the book, of the US government's formal, official structure for designating and dealing with terrorist groups. We have a legal structure that was established by the 1996 Anti-terrorist Act, by which our government formally designates so-called foreign terrorist organizations, or FTOs, of which there are now 29 on the list; the most recent edition being the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan that was added last Fall.

Those 29 do not by any means tell the whole story of international terrorism. And there are a good number of other groups of serious concern, and you can read about these in Patterns as well, that aren't formally designated. For example, the fringe Irish groups like the so-called Real IRA or Continuity IRA, which are one of the biggest problems in cementing peace in Northern Ireland. Or the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has emerged as one of the most active and deadly of the Kashmiri militant Islamic groups operating in the Subcontinent. Or, the AUC, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, which is commonly referred to as the principal right-wing paramilitary group in that country which has been responsible for much of the violence there and is one of the major complicating factors in trying to achieve peace in Colombia.

The problem is not any lack of awareness by US officials of the activity and the problems that these groups pose. The problem is the way our legal structure treats foreign terrorist groups, which as set up under the 1996 law a rather cumbersome process of formally designating FTO, foreign terrorist organizations. It's slow to operate. There are heavy legal requirements to make sure than any designation stands up in court. And in fact, there have been challenges to designations in court. And this means it's very difficult to change the list quickly to respond to a changed roster of international terrorist groups.

It would be far better in my view to remove the legal impedimenta from any formal U.S. list of terrorist groups, retaining tools such as the freezing of financial assets which are provided for in the 1996 legislation, to be used as a matter of Executive discretion, more nimbly and more flexibly. And then have a list that would truly reflect, as a matter of intelligence and policy, the real picture of international terrorism as we see it today. Now the final kind of trend that I'd like to focus on is the precipitous decline, over the last dozen years or so, of state sponsorship of terrorism.

There are a number of reasons for this decline having to do with such things as the demise of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, the spread of globalization that are behind this decline. And we don't have time to go into this now unless you want to ask questions about it. But I just want you to consider for a moment how big the change has been with some of the states that are still on the formal U.S. government list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Consider the situation of the 1980s with what these states are doing now. North Korea, for example, went from a state that blew up an airliner that killed over 100 people and set off a bomb also in the 1980s that killed most of the South Korean cabinet, to a situation today where they provide a retirement home for a few has-been Japanese leftists. They've possibly been involved in a kidnapping or assassination or two over the last two or three years, although I don't think we can point to any particular incident over the last year. And they've possibly sold a few arms for financial reasons, not political reasons, to Islamic militants in the Philippines.

Cuba has gone from a big, ambitious program of political violence throughout Latin America and Africa to total retrenchment overseas. All the Cubans do these days with regard to terrorist groups, they provide a retirement home for a few old ETA-Basque types and a couple of U.S. fugitives. They maintain some ties to the Colombian groups, the ELN and to a lesser extent the FARQ. But those are benign ties, where far from promoting terrorism the Cubans are actually supporting the peace process in Colombia.

And then one might mention Libya, which in the 1980s was committing such outrages as PanAm-103. Qadhafi has now essentially gotten out of the terrorist business. He's broken completely with his principal client, Abu Nidal. He has only residual links at best with other Palestinian groups that he's been associated with. He's cooperated with other Arab governments on counter-terrorism. And, of course, he coughed up a little over a year ago the two Pan Am 103 suspects.

In contrast to this considerable, sweeping change, we've had complete stasis, immobility in the list of state sponsors. The last change was when Sudan was added in 1993. No country has ever been taken off the U.S. state sponsor list because of real improvement in terrorist behavior. The only two times in which states were taken off were South Yemen in 1990 when it merged with North Yemen, and Iraq which was temporarily taken off the list in 1982 when we were tilting towards Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War.

Any system of designations of state sponsors that is that inflexible in the face of tremendous change over the last decade in the true picture of state sponsorship is, I would suggest, insufficiently flexible. The basic problem we have here is that terrorism and the U.S. policies towards these states, terrorism in effect has been hijacked by other issues: be it the issue of internal democracy in Cuba or other things that concern us with some of the other states. And that in turn is because there are sanctions, considerable, extensive sanctions, automatically applied whenever a country is so designated. It's not a matter of executive discretion.

Now the other issues may very well be more important than terrorism in any one case. Terrorism is not the most important issue even with each of the countries of the seven that are currently on the state sponsorship list. But when counterterrorism not just gets overruled, but, in effect, gets hijacked by these other issues, there's a price to pay. There's a price in terms of lessened credibility of U.S. counterterrorist policy. Every time the patterns report comes out, it's an occasion for questions to be asked, and I suspect some of you will ask questions along this line next week as to why a Cuba, for example, is still on the list, but, say, Pakistan is not on the list.

Moreover, to automatically apply sanctions and leave them in effect for so long in the face of the changes that we've seen in state sponsorship undercuts the very purpose of the sanctions. If the purpose is to get people to improve their behavior, but they come to realize that even if they improve it, there's not going to be any change, then you've removed the incentives the sanctions themselves are supposed to establish.

Look at Libya. It has been probably the biggest success story so far with regard to the use of sanctions for counterterrorist purposes. There is no doubt that the sanctions imposed on Libya were a major reason that Qadhafi, albeit after a delay of several years, finally did cough up the PanAm-103 suspects. If we don't do anything else with regard to policy toward Libya, and that relationship stays in the freezer, despite the considerable changes in Qadhafi's policies I just described, then we run the risk of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with regard to Libya and terrorism.

A better arrangement paralleling what I was suggesting with regard to the foreign terrorist organizations is to decouple the sanctions from the listings as a matter of what law says must be applied automatically, retain the tools as a matter of executive discretion, and, therefore, you have more flexibility in really calling a spade a spade with regard to who's doing terrorism these days and who isn't. It also means avoiding case specific legislation, bearing in mind that legislation is inherently less flexible that executive action. Legislation such as the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, which, as you know, comes up for renewal later this year, or the Helms-Burton Act, which pertains to Cuba, which mandates certain sanctions which cannot remove except in certain cases in which presidential waivers can be used, as they have been used in the Helms-Burton.

One final thought before I close. And that is, the U.S. may be the single greatest terrorist target and will remain so. But as you look at where the terrorists are operating and fold out the map that you're going to see in the back of "Patterns" as you get the report next week, and not just where the attacks are taking place, but where the terrorists live and work and where they maintain their networks, it is clear that the United States needs not just a little, but a lot of help from its friends, and not just from the people we traditionally think of as friends, but from many other countries around the world. The United States simply doesn't have the access or the resources or the authorities to do the job itself. When you think of those successes of rolling up terrorist plots, arresting people before they can set a bomb off, most of the people who have to do that work with regard to international terrorism are foreign police and security services.

And so perhaps the biggest counterterrorist weapon that the United States has, at least as big as the security countermeasures and the prosecutions in a New York court, and all those other things we traditionally think of as counterterrorism, is a healthy set of foreign relationships which helps insure that those other governments around will take the necessary steps to do their part to fight this particular problem.

Thank you. And I don't know who's going to go next.

MR. NESSEN: Director Woolsey, do you want to go next?

MR. R. JAMES WOOLSEY: All right. I agree with much of what Paul said. His recommendations are sensible; his stricture that law enforcement should not be the sole tool that we use, that foreign policy is a central matter in dealing with terrorism, and that the list of the terrorist sponsoring states is too large. We said the same thing on the Commission on Terrorism two years ago chaired by former Ambassador Bremer that I served on.

There has been a big change I think in the number of states sponsoring terrorism. But I want to flag an issue which is a very, very big footnote to that conclusion. It is Iraq.

The United States has an extraordinarily vulnerable infrastructure—energy, water, electricity, financial transactions and the rest that are interrelated, computer networks. Most of those networks were designed for ease of maintenance, not for resistance to attack of any kind. They were designed, many of them, with ease of access, with many single-point failures. And they are easy prey for a patient state actor sitting behind and operating through terrorist groups and going after them.

If one has evidence that a state actor may be involved in working with a group such as Osama bin Laden or other terrorist groups and stays silent in the face of such evidence, the result is worse than not deterring. It is sort of the opposite of deterrence. It is hanging a "kick me" sign on one's country. And I believe that one can make a reasonable—I will not say conclusive, but a reasonable case that we have been doing that for some time now with respect to the possibility of Iraqi sponsored terrorism operating through and with Sunni terrorist groups around the world, and even perhaps in the United States. I would urge everyone, in addition to Paul's fine book, to look at the book published late last year by Laurie Mylroie at the American Enterprise Institute called "Study of Revenge," which makes, I would say, not a conclusive, but at least a very interesting circumstantial case that the Iraqi government was involved in the World Trade Center bombing.

Now, much evidence in circumstances like this, when the United States takes the posture that Paul criticized, I think correctly, that all terrorism should first and foremost be a law enforcement matter, what happens in such a case is that virtually all of the evidence that is collected is collected under grand jury secrecy rules. And what that means is that substantial shares of the executive branch, including the intelligence agencies and including even many parts of the White House, let's say, do not have access to it. It is in the hands of portions of the FBI and prosecutors in individual cases. One of the interesting things that Laurie did is to go back into the evidence that was submitted, voluminous evidence in the World Trade Center case, and after it was public, after the trial was over, and to assess it in light of the theory of James Fox, who was the chief FBI agent in charge of the original World Trade Center investigation in New York. His theory and hers was that the Iraqi government was essentially behind Ramsi Yousef and that much of what happened in New York was a false flag operation; namely, that there were individuals who had been recruited precisely in order to be caught, precisely in order for a false impression to be created.

Now, Americans naturally shy from conspiracy theories. They naturally shy away from the notion that a government might take a long-term attitude of vengeance or operate in this way. But I tell that in the part of the world that Saddam Hussein comes from, false flag operations are sort of a way of life and have been for many centuries. And I would urge that as we look at the issue of state sponsorship, as we look at reducing the list, as Paul says, I think accurately, as we look at questions such as letting our foreign policy take into consideration changes in states that formerly sponsored terrorism, and so forth, we also consider at least the possibility that in this bear market of number of states sponsoring terrorism, there could conceivably be one bull performer and one that has masked his hand very successfully over the course of the last several years. The Iraqi government is in possession of substantial amounts of weapons of mass destruction. Hansa (ph), the former head of the nuclear programs, says fissionable material capable of building, to date at least, a couple of bombs, and within another couple of years, another three years perhaps, four nuclear weapons. We know from all of the U.N. inspections that were curtailed that there is substantial work on biological agents going on in Iraq. We know that Saddam was working on injecting aflatoxin, for example, into tear gas. Why one would want to put an agent that creates long-term liver cancer into tear gas is an interesting question. But we also note from the investigations of the very heroic Dr. Christine Gosden in northern Iraq of the gassing of the Kurds that the Kurds in northern Iraq that were gassed by Saddam some years ago have many more symptoms than would be accounted for merely by nerve gas or mustard gas which was used against them.

So as we move into this new post Cold War world and as look carefully individually at countries and take&3151;I think you're right—some of them off the terrorist list, and if we also want to examine the possibility that the conventional wisdom, and it is now the conventional wisdom both in law enforcement and in the intelligence community in the United States, that most terrorism of the sort that occurred at the World Trade Center are, quote, "loose networks," and that that is the new terrorism, and that these are sort of pick-up teams of folks who just kind of, inspired by sheikh here or there, get an idea into their heads to go blow something up, that might be right. But before you reach that conclusion, I would urge you, in addition to Paul's fine book, to look at the sort of theory that's proposed by Laurie Mylroie.

MR. NESSEN: Patrick, do you want to go next?

MR. PATRICK CLAWSON: Paul has a very nice discussion about making the list of state sponsors more nuanced and talks about distinguishing among sponsors, cooperators and enablers. I think that's a very useful suggestion.

I think we have a real problem of how to deal with semi-state actors, or semi-autonomous states. For instance, I think of the question of how do we treat Lebanon. Now, clearly there are terrorist organizations operating on Lebanese soil and, in fact, engaged in terrorist attacks from Lebanon. But we have not listed Lebanon on our state sponsors of terrorism, because we have, as I understand it, taken the attitude that Lebanon is not fully in control of its territory and not fully responsible for these people. Well, we'd like to see Lebanon have more control over its territory, and as Lebanon indeed does exercise more authority, there's a question of how far do we push Lebanon to take actions against these terrorist groups, recognizing the limits of Lebanon's authority, given the presence of 30,000-some Syrian troops there. But that's an example of a semi-autonomous actor and how do we treat them in our state sponsorship discussion.

Similarly, of course, there's the question of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which we do not list in our state sponsors of terrorism because we don't recognize them as a government. And then there's also the very difficult case that I want to return a little later in my remarks, and that is the Palestinian Authority. I think the paradox is that if we were to recognize an independent Palestine, the day we recognized it we'd have to simultaneously list it as a state sponsor of terrorism using our current criteria. I'm not sure that Mr. Arafat would particularly appreciate that.

So we have a problem here with some of these semi-autonomous actors and how do we accommodate our existing instruments for this world where there're some of these semi-autonomous actors.

Also, as Paul points out, we need to develop something, what I would call a rogue map: how do we help those rogues get out of their rogue status. And as he put it in his remarks, the key problem is what do we do about the states that providing retirement homes for past terrorist activities, the Cubas, the Libyas, indeed the Syrias of this world. And there I would just note that, in fact, being on the terrorism list has brought with it an opprobrium which has been an important motivator for some of these governments in changing their behavior. I think, for instance, of the Syrian government, which truly detests being on that list and has been prepared to do a number of things in order to get off that list. Now, they haven't been prepared to do things on the terrorism front, and we haven't gotten very much from the Syrian government on the terrorism front. But, frankly, keeping them on that list has had important benefits for U.S. foreign policy elsewhere. And just as we have listed countries on that list at times because of non-terrorism foreign policy objectives, so, too, we've gotten benefits that we non-terrorism benefits from putting them on that list.

A last comment on the state sponsor argument, which is, as an amateur historian, I'm impressed by how much we look at episodes of terrorism, be it the anarchists of the pre-World War I period, the various ethnic separatist terrorists of the inter-war period, or, for that matter, if we take a look at some of the left-wing terrorists of the 1960s and early 1970s. What we discovered many years later on is that there was a lot more state sponsorship that people thought at the time. And that has been a systematic lesson of history. And therefore, I think we have to be cautious in evaluating how much we know about state sponsorship at any given period of time. It has generally been the case that states have hidden their sponsorship of terrorism, that it has been the exception to have situations such as we had for a period in the '70s and 1980s where some states were actually trumpeting their involvement as state sponsors of terrorism, that hiding one's hand has been more the rule than the exception. And I say this as someone who, in the 1980s as a student of Iran, was quite pooh-poohing the arguments that Iran was behind all the hostage-taking in Lebanon. Well, it turned out I was quite wrong. They were behind it. And so I wonder how much terrorism going on today, for instance how much of Osama bin Laden's activities, there may be more state involvement than we know about.

Let me also say a couple of words, though, about the issue of the law enforcement as an instrument for counterterrorism, I think there's a very nice nuanced discussion in Paul's book about the advantages and the problems that come with the emphasis on the law enforcement approach. I would perhaps make the case a little less diplomatically than he. That is, that the law enforcement approach sometimes can become an excuse for inaction. When a terrorist activity takes place, that you say that we can't take any actions now because we have to wait until the law enforcement has been able to work itself out. But then by the time at which law enforcement does work itself out, it becomes either diplomatically inconvenient, as in the Khobar Towers' bombing, or it becomes problematic, as in the Lockerbie case, to engage in further activity.

So we have a real problem that the law enforcement for counterterrorism may be, in the eyes of some people, an excuse for inaction. And we have to bear that in mind that some people may manipulate our interest in using the rule of law against terrorism as a way to prevent us from taking effective counterterrorism action.

That said, the emphasis on law enforcement and the rule of law can be a powerful instrument for us to use, and I think we should be less shy about using it. And there I think in particular about the question of the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Authority has in the last eight months now of the intifada has emphasized injustices to which the Palestinians are subject as if somehow that is an explanation for the terrorist activities that have been engaged in.

Well, there was a time when the United States government was particularly articulate in emphasizing that its opposition to terrorism was opposition to an instrument that was an opposition irrespective of the justice or injustice of the cause for which it was being used. And that was a powerful argument, that it was helpful to us I think in the 1980s, in which we said, look, you may have the most just cause in the world, but you sully your cause when you use such an instrument such as terrorism in order to advance it. And we should make a major effort to emphasize that our opposition to the terrorism in the Palestinian case is an opposition to an instrument that is being used here, irrespective of the justice of the cause that the Palestinians may have. Because I think that would do much to help explain to the Palestinian public why we think that it's inappropriate for these terrorist activities to be carried out and why we think the Palestinian Authority should engage in counterterrorism operations and cooperate with the United States and, indeed, with the Israelis in counterterrorism operations; that we think their cause is ill-served by using this instrument. And it's unfortunate that we have not made that a major feature of our commentary about the situation with the Palestinian intifada, that here's an example of how we can use law enforcement effectively as an instrument, and we are not doing it.

MR. NESSEN: John.

MR. JOHN PARACHINI: I would just add in these opening months of the Bush administration that next week's release of the "Patterns" volume is a useful benchmark to begin to get a handle on how the U.S. government sees a very fluid problem. People in government know how difficult it is to try and pin down whether it is a state sponsor or a sub-national group with a variety of different networks across the world. So any time we can get a benchmark, we must recognize that that's what it is; it's a snapshot in time. But at least we then know how to gauge from that benchmark where activities are occurring.

I think one thing about Paul's volume that is very useful for incoming Bush administration people is how it puts this problem in the context that there's lots of tools in the toolkit, and we should see U.S. foreign policy and how we articulate that in different regions in the world as creating a context in which violence may or may not happen. Indeed, if you look at the "Patterns" volume in the last several years, and probably this upcoming year, you'll see most of the incidents against Americans have been against American business, not necessarily against the government. So the climate in which American business operates can be safer in some instances if foreign policy, American foreign policy in that region is sensitive to what it does and how it affects the political environment there. I think that's an important thing.

The other thing, as Paul noted, while the number of attacks have come down, the lethality is up. But we should note that there is this dynamic between the quantitative and qualitative nature of these statistics. The number of casualties is up due to a few very tragic incidents, particularly in East Africa. But, overall, in the United States, or around the globe, this problem is getting more and more manageable. It'll never be perfectly manageable. We're always going to confront this. And we're going to confront it in new places. But we should at least recognize the successes, which I think there have been many. And it's not only that the state sponsor list has gotten smaller, but, indeed, there's a lot of unlikely allies that we now have in the fight against terrorism. We now have discussions with the Russians on terrorism. We've had some discussions with the Chinese. We have discussions with India. So this is a moment where the Bush administration might pick up from this benchmark that'll be laid down with "Patterns" and draw from the full set of tools in the counterterrorism toolbox and look for unlikely allies, to change the political context in some places, to cooperate with countries that are faced with problems of terrorism in their country or in their region in new ways. And I think it's important to note that the focus of terrorism globally has really shifted from—it's still in the Middle East, but shifted increasingly to South Asia and Central Asia. These are where a number of emerging states that are weaker, that don't necessarily have the capabilities or indeed the institutional knowledge that other countries have had in dealing with this problem need our assistance, and indeed have been cooperating with the United States. And this could be an area where we could stem a lot of this difficulty.

Let me turn to the point that Ambassador Woolsey made, which I think is central here, about keeping an eye on some sponsors that have been bedeviling not only the United States as the major power, but essentially the international community, and Iraq is indeed the perfect case of that. We should continue to watch state sponsors that we're concerned about in the Middle East. Iran, Syria and Iraq are the ones that immediately come to mind. There will be others. But there is something going on out there. The globalization we see in the corporate world, and indeed in international communications, is also occurring in the world of sub-national groups and organized crime. We need to measure our focus on state sponsors with also a sensitivity to the exchanges that are going on in the world. The things that have really affected American counterterrorism thinking in the 1990s was the World Trade Center bombing, the Murrah Federal Building bombing, and the bombing of the East African embassies. Those are the incidents that were dramatic. Revelations about the clandestine program of the former Soviet Union, all of their weapons arsenal, the clandestine chemical and biological weapons program in South Africa, and the incredible revelations in Iraq all suggested to us that people could hide a lot of stuff in states that we never imagined, and maybe there was a chance that some of this might be traced to trans-national groups. States we can find. Trans-national groups we can't. Aum Shinri Kyo in Japan was a religious group in an allied country that we never focused on. Why should we focus on a religious group in an allied country? They can take care of themselves. And yet this is an example of the type of group that we don't anticipate, that poses a challenge, that we need to put in place some of the tools to help us manage the unanticipated.

Let me conclude. I think Ambassador Woolsey points to Laurie Mylroie's book on the World Trade Center. I, too, worked on that case for two years and came up with a different conclusion. But I think his point is a good one. Is it state sponsors, and is there a connection there? Or what is the nature of a transnational network? Because, indeed, most of the reporting that you see on bin Laden points to bin Laden as a loose network, that there is a clash of civilizations, and bin Laden is the army engaged in that war, not necessarily a state sponsor. I don't think the jury has quite solved it. I have a different view than Laurie Mylroie, but I think the issue is there to be examined. And several years from now when this panel might be reconvened, when Paul takes another time out of government to write another good book, we might revisit this issue and see how much more we know about this problem.

Thank you.

MR. NESSEN: Well, thank all of you. We're going to ask for audience questions and comments. But before that, let me just see if I can initiate a little discussion among the group about a couple of things that have been said. First of all, is there agreement in what Patrick said that the day we recognize the Palestinian Authority is the same day that we will have to put them on the list for states sponsoring terrorism? Paul?

MR. PILLAR: I think that the most important thing Patrick said, with which I agree wholeheartedly, is what we are condemning is a method, not an entity, not a group, not a body, and to reinforce with whoever is in control of PA at that time the concept that use of terrorist methods, or support for terrorist methods is something we condemn, we will continue to condemn, and we will take measures against without that necessarily being a basis for not doing any business with or not recognizing that entity as a state in the case of the PA. That's the most important distinction.

So, you know, how you finesse it diplomatically with regard to the PA becoming a fully recognized state, that will be what the people at the State Department earn their pay doing when that time comes. But the important point is, it's a method, it's not a group that we're condemning.

MR. NESSEN: Director Woolsey, Patrick also said that we ought to tell the Palestinian Authority that it ill-serves their cause. Do you agree with that?

MR. WOOLSEY: Oh, absolutely. I mean I think Pat's quite right. Certainly we do need to try to work with the Palestinians. But anyone who would suggest that what they're engaged in now, the Palestinian Authority, is not terrorism has got to be, you know, just completely turning away from the facts. It's quite clear they're sponsoring terrorism. And we really, I think, have to use all the authority we can muster while we try to work with them and the Israelis in some kind of settlement over the years. And I think it'll be years, perhaps decades, maybe centuries. I think we have to be clear about what they are doing in terms of sponsoring terrorism is just completely unacceptable.

MR. NESSEN: In all that the four of you have said this morning, none of it has come anywhere near the kind of scary media stories about the terrorist threat from anthrax and from nuclear weapons smuggled in briefcases, and poison gas and chemicals and cyber terrorism, wrecking all the computer systems.

MR. WOOLSEY: I'll join the scary side on that. I tried to point out the interrelationship between the parts of the infrastructure and how vulnerable they were. I tried to point out that Saddam is working on biological weapons. Certainly, there are great difficulties, including assembling amounts, reasonable amounts of fissionable material because of international controls in nuclear terrorism, and as far as chemical terrorism is concerned, chemicals are very big and bulky and as Aum showed, it's hard to kill a great many people using chemicals. But biologicals are quite different. Theoretically, there are 100 million lethal doses in a gram of anthrax. Now you have to distribute it—you won't get that kind of lethality from what you really distribute, but a reasonable distribution system of crop spray or something, driving around in a truck or flying around in an aircraft could kills tens or hundreds of thousands of people in a major city.

Although you have to smuggle things and assemble big pieces of equipment and materiel to do things with nuclear weapons or with chemical weapons, anthrax grows in a fair number of cow pastures all over the world. You don't have to smuggle anything. Making it is somewhat harder than running a microbrewery attached to a restaurant, but it has some similarities in terms of the size and scope and complexity of the equipment. Happily there are one or two aspects of weaponizing anthrax or some of the other types of agents that are difficult, and Aum apparently cracked up on some of those efforts and so steered itself off into merely using chemicals.

But we are far from out of the woods with respect to the terrorist threat, I think, especially state-sponsored terrorist threat to our infrastructure, or from biological attacks. The one thing that I guess I would argue with, and any of this discussion of trends in saying, oh, numbers of incidents are down, and we're getting a handle on this and so forth, to me that's a little bit like saying, you know, things looked pretty good in terms of our ability to contain the Japanese navy until the morning of December 7th, 1941. The trends were really pretty good over the course of the previous couple of years.

So I don't think we should be, you know, somnolent or relaxed or complacent at all about the possibility of substantial terrorism, including weapons of mass destruction, most likely biological, against targets in the United States, or American interests, or the interests of friends or allies abroad. As I said, I think the most direct and immediate concern for something like that, a very professional operation, would be state sponsorship behind, or in cooperation with a group like bin Laden or some other terrorist group, either knowing cooperation or, with respect to some of the terrorists, being dupes and being false flags.

MR. NESSEN: Well, you certainly have put a blight on my fondness for microbrew.

MR. WOOLSEY: Well, I hope so.

MR. CLAWSON: A caution about working ourselves into a frenzy, though. I mean, I think, for instance, about the American concern about radioactive material. It makes me think that a terrorist group which got its hands on a bunch of medical radioactive material, which is available on a major street corner in the United States, could have us tied in knots well beyond the public health threat that that represents.

Or if you want to talk about the vulnerability of our infrastructure to attack, I think that the California governor and legislature have done a much better job of attacking our infrastructure than any terrorist group has done. So I really think we ought to keep these things in perspective. And, yes, our electricity system does shut down from time to time on an unplanned basis, and not necessarily because of terrorist groups. And, still, life goes on.

MR. WOOLSEY: Excuse me. One sentence. The Wall Street Journal this morning said that the bankruptcy judge in California who may well take over operation of the California energy system, could not do a worse job than the governor of California, unless he was in fact a North Korean agent.

MR. NESSEN: John, just one more trend, talking a little bit about the trends here in terrorism. Let me ask you, do you share the view that North Korea, Cuba, and Libya have, by their behavior, changed behavior and pretty much removed themselves from the state-sponsored terrorism list?

MR. PARACHINI: I think it's good that Paul draws attention to this because it's not only that they are sort of retired from this business, and that there's an opportunity to change the political relationship with these countries over time that could affect lots of different aspects of U.S. foreign policy. It really points to the inflexibility of legislative tools sometimes to address this problem.

That's not to say that the Congress doesn't have I think an important role in working with the executive branch on this, and particularly in an oversight role. I think, for example, Congressman Shays from Connecticut has charged the General Accounting Office to do a whole series of reports that greatly enhance the debate about how we respond to terrorism in this country. That's very useful.

But legislative tools, when you get them in place, sometimes lock things in in a way that does not help in dealing with a very fluid problem. I think Paul's general inclination toward executive branch flexibility on this problem I think is sound.

MR. PILLAR: One point of clarification with regard to the state sponsors still on the list who have improved their behavior—lest that be taken as a blanket argument for me to keep—start immediately taking lots of countries off the list, let me emphasize there are various degrees of engagement that it would be worthwhile for the U.S. to practice, even if a country is still on the list, with or without the legislative reforms I suggested.

In the case of Libya, we've got one major unfinished piece of business, and that is the payment of compensation to the families of the Pan Am 103 victims. Once that is done then the United States can and should declare that as the admission of responsibility and guilt on the part of the Libyan government. There is no other reasonable way to interpret it. I am optimistic that we will reach that moment when Libya pays compensation, as it did with the UTA 772 bombing, and the case of the shooting of the British policewoman in London.

In the case of Syria, I mean we still have a problem. They are providing not just a retirement home but also are hosting active groups like the PFLPGC as a kind of a club to hold over the head of the Libyans - over the Israelis, rather. We have to look at the Syrian situation in the context of the Syrian-Israeli peace process, or lack of peace process.

The question of Syrian sponsorship of terrorism will be dealt with only until and unless we have an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement. It will be dealt with then because the Israelis will settle for nothing less. So it probably does make sense to keep Syria still on the list until we get that settlement with Israel. It makes sense to keep Libya still on the list until payment is made to the families of the Pan Am 103 victims.

MR. WOOLSEY: You sort of get an A list and a B list, and the A list is, I think, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. And then you have countries such as North Korea and others, Cuba, that have some historic and tenuous tie to supporting terrorism. And the enablers, as Paul says, and for the point of view of that, Pakistan and Greece both clearly are serious problems.

In Europe we had five of these hard left Marxist-Leninist assassination-oriented terrorist groups back in the 70s and in to the '80s. Four European countries broke them. The Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigades, and so forth. And the fifth one is 17 November, and Greece has in the last few months begun to talk the talk, but it has not, as far as I can tell, begun to walk the walk in terms of trying to catch anybody in 17 November. I'm not quite sure what we do in 2004 when the Olympics come up. I guess we ask the Greek government for assurances that 17 November will not be part of the reception committee for American and British athletes at the Athens airport, but I wonder what those assurances are worth.

MR. NESSEN: Let me raise one more issue before going to the audience. It's common wisdom, of course, that the worst terrorist episode ever, the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City, was done by American terrorists. How do you assess the relative danger of foreign-sponsored groups versus homegrown terrorism, and are we looking less for homegrown terrorism? Is this why this was allowed to happen? We have a pretty elaborate system for looking at home-sponsored terrorism?

MR. PARACHINI: I think your question is a good one because it points to something that the Bush administration should try and improve upon some of the contributions the Clinton administration made in the counter-terrorism field. That is, try and get a comprehensive national threat assessment that not only looks abroad but also looks at home. There are restrictions on the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency from looking inside, but that's what the FBI does.

There needs to be somebody who can wrap together both for a couple of reasons. One is, in recent years almost 85 percent of the cases that the FBI were following were not foreigners in the United States, but American citizens. Two, increasingly there are transnational connections between the animal rights groups, between various diaspora communities that live in the United States and live in other places. And indeed, between various right wing Christian identity groups between here and in Europe.

So in order to capture the danger that's presented by these transnational groups, we've got to somehow bring these two halves of our threat assessment together, which we do episodically in interagency meetings, but it's useful to have a benchmark, an annual or every couple of years benchmark that is a threat assessment that brings both of them together such that the executive branch can make decisions about investments, some of which may take years to develop. For example, various vaccines against various biological weapons.

If we make decisions about investments for technology development based on one set of threats from either one terrorist group or groups here in the United States, we may make the wrong investment. So I think it's a particularly difficult challenge, and it's better to see the threat in both its domestic and international contexts.

MR. WOOLSEY: One thing we pointed out in the Brimer Terrorism Commission is that both domestically and foreign threats are not understood nearly as well as they could be because of guidelines under which the FBI has to operate in this country, and the CIA overseas. These guidelines for the FBI derive from some of the excesses that they had in the early—back in the early 60s and 70s, COINTELPRO and the like. But the guidelines under which they operate now have been added to over the years, and it is very difficult for them to open a real investigation, for example, if a group of Christian identity folks get together and say, Armageddon should come soon and anthrax should be the way we should do it. You might think that would make it possible to open an investigation, but probably not, under their guidelines.

We read through their guidelines. They go on for 40, 50 pages. We had several fairly competent lawyers on the Brimer Commission and none of us could make heads or tails out of the FBI guidelines as they have been built up over the years.

The CIA problem is that as a result of the crimes reporting requirement, if you're going to recruit a businessman who knows about shipments to Libya, if he may have been involved in insider trading in New York 20 years before, you have to go get a letter of declination from the Justice Department, if you're a CIA officer, before you can recruit him as a spy against Libya, that they're not going to prosecute him for insider trading.

As a result of the guidelines that were put out in the aftermath of the Jennifer Harbury-Bamaca business in Guatemala a few years ago, there are serious restrictions on the CIA's ability to recruit informants who may have some type of violence in their background.

Now if you're trying to recruit out of a government, there are lots of good people trapped inside bad governments. So we've recruited a lot of wonderful Russian patriots who were democratically minded folks as spies for the CIA during the Cold War. That still happens a lot with respect to governments. Let me tell you, if you're in Hezbollah, or Aum Shinri Kyo, or in bin Laden's organization, it's because you want to be a human rights violator. There aren't sort of a lot of nice folks lurking in there who don't do bad things, who are going to volunteer to report to the CIA. You've got to do what the FBI does in organized crime cases—you've got to pay cash on the barrel head to really ugly people in order to get information. The CIA guidelines now don't bar that, but they do deter it.

So we have some barriers to get over, both in terms of domestic intelligence for the FBI against groups like the Christian identity groups, and foreign intelligence for the CIA to collect against groups like bin Laden's group. They are barriers that can be hurdled, but we're making things a lot harder for FBI special agents and CIA case officers overseas than we really need to.

MR. NESSEN: Let's take some audience questions. Also, those who are watching this event in its Web cast, you can send your questions or comments, e-mail to communications@brookings.edu, and we'll try to work that into the program, too. If you have a question, wait for the mike to come, and stand up and identify yourself.

MR. KHAN: My name is Assal Khan with Jane's of London. What I observed or heard this morning is a conspicuous absence of blaming our allies for the proliferation of terrorism, connected with the foreign policy of Israel in the Middle East, connected with our good relations with Saudi Arabia, because bin Laden is a Saudi, and money from Saudi Arabia does flow to terrorist groups abroad.

Of course, when Mr. Clawson said that the Palestinians do terrorist acts, I just cannot imagine that throwing stones by teenagers is a terrorist act. Are we going to forever shield our policy toward Israel as not being one of the reasons why terrorism in the Islamic world is growing?

MR. CLAWSON: One of the arguments that I think we had made most successfully about counter-terrorism is that we want to disassociate our harsh criticism of terrorism as a method from our attitude about the cause on behalf of which it's used, so that we don't need to enter into a discussion about the justice or the injustice of the Tamil cause or the cause of Irish Republicanism, or the Palestinian cause, but we can say to all of these of these people that you're not helping to advance your cause when you use this unacceptable method of indiscriminate attacks against innocent civilians on the opposite side. And that our opposition to terrorism is opposition to terrorism as a method, so that you don't get caught in these kinds of 1970 debates in which people think that what we're doing is criticizing those who are doing things that we don't approve of, while shielding those whose policy objectives we approve of.

It's important that we criticize terrorism as a method. And that we disassociate that from our our attitudes about the causes on behalf of which its used. So you can say to Palestinians who are feeling intensely dissatisfied with Israeli policy that we strongly support your right to carry out all manner of protest against Israeli policy, but we don't think that terrorism is the appropriate method to do that.

MR. WOOLSEY: I would simply add that I hope that the reporting in the generally excellent publications put out by Jane's is more accurate than the characterization that the only thing the Palestinians are doing today is having teenagers throw stones.

MR. PILLAR: There is no question that in the course of the last several months, in the course of the seven months of the new intifada, we have had unfortunate regression by elements that are now part of the Palestinian Authority into direct involvement and direct support for things that we would all agree are terrorism, and it's not just the stone-throwing.

And with regard to the other parties in question, I think the United States government has been pretty forward in condemning not just terrorist methods, as Patrick was speaking, but in abusive responses to terrorism on the other side that raise human rights and other questions. This has been the case with Israel, it's been the case with Turkey in some of the excessive measures they've taken against the PKK. All you have to do is read the State Department's publicly releasable human rights reports to see how direct that criticism can be.

MR. NESSEN: Just to come back to what you had said earlier on that line about Greece. Do you think the US has expressed its views about Greece's support of terrorism?

MR. WOOLSEY: I'm sure it's expressed its views privately to the Greek government many, many, many times, but it hasn't produced any results. Something that Paul just said triggered a thought in my mind, and it's one of the reasons why I think vigorous defenses against terrorism and prosecution of terrorists operating in this country are a very high priority.

I think it can be argued that one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest outrage against civil liberties in 20th century America was the arrest and incarceration in essentially concentration camps of the Nisei, the Japanese-Americans in 1942. Tens of thousands of innocent people were locked up for the duration of the war. No, they were not exterminated as the Germans did people in concentration camps. They were British-style concentration camps as they operated during the Boer War, but they were concentration camps.

You could say that three men were central—there were others, but three men were central to that decision: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Earl Warren, then-attorney general of California, and Hugo Black, the Supreme Court justice who wrote Korematsu against the United States, the decision that upheld the constitutionality. Now those are probably the three greatest names in liberalism in 20th century America.

So the interesting point here is that even people who their whole lives are identified with and stand up for civil liberties and the rule of law can do really crazy things when the country gets scared. So one of our tasks here, I think, is to try to operate against terrorists and against terrorist acts in such a way that the country doesn't get scared and again do something for which over the long run it will be very ashamed of itself.

MR. NESSEN: Other questions?

Q: During the 1970s and early 80s we saw terrorists conducting a variety of activities. We had hostage-takings, airline hijackings, kidnappings, assassinations of top leaders, and bombings. As legitimate governments began to develop counter-terrorism technologies and federal law enforcement techniques, this seems to have evaporated into one or two major tactics conducted by terrorists, mostly in the form of this or that kind of bombing.

A few years ago, as our techniques to counter or deter bombings improved, we began to notice terrorists taking a big interest in what today we're calling cyber-terrorism. We were warned by a CIA director and other leaders here in the US that cyber-terrorism taking down our key infrastructures was going to be the top threat of the new century.

Where is terrorism now regarding cyber-terrorist activities? Have we seen the top terrorist groups improving in this area, and what are we to expect?

MR. PILLAR: What we've seen so far is much less than the potential that has been discussed. There are a number of the top terrorist groups, as you put it, as well as ones that aren't so much at the top, who have demonstrated considerable skills with regard to use of computers and networks and you look at Hezbollah's Web site, real sophisticated stuff.

A number of these groups are also using modern information technology just in the same way that legitimate businesses would use it to include the efficiency and effectiveness and reach of their operations. As to malicious attacks taking down systems of Western government and the like, there's been essentially nothing of that so far by terrorist groups. Very mild, unsophisticated kinds of things. That is not, of course, to minimize at all the potential for things we might yet see.

I think one of the good news stories about how to respond to that is, most of the same steps that one would have to take to increase the security of our electronic infrastructure against terrorist groups are the exact same steps we have to take to increase the security against teenage hackers or people who might want to commit sabotage for purely commercial reasons. There's clearly a lot more that needs to be done for that along those lines, and probably should be done along those lines, even if one doesn't venture the prediction that the top tier terrorist groups, international or domestic, are going to get into this technique in a big way.

MR. NESSEN: Well, is the U.S. also using cyber-technology? If the terrorists are using cyber-technology, particularly communications, is the United States using cyber-technology to listen in on the communications? I mean, there's been a lot of publicity about the carnivore system. And where does that conflict with privacy rights?

MR. WOOLSEY: I think it's important that the government, pursuant to law domestically, and pursuant to guidelines overseas, vigorously use technology to penetrate terrorist groups. But it has to do it pursuant to law. In this country I think you have to work hard on infrastructure protection systems that don't work in such a way that they intrude on people's e-mails unless you've got a court order to do so.

I have a friend, defector, who's a former officer in directorate of the KGB, which is the code-breaking and code-protecting part of the KGB. He gave a speech right across the street here a couple of months ago on this subject, and a lot of the people in the audience were in American business, and they were talking about how this is not really much of a problem, that we're putting cookies into your computers so we can learn how to market to you better and so forth. He said, let me tell you, I spent the first 32 years of my life in a country where privacy didn't exist and you want to be careful being too tolerant of little brothers because little brothers have a way of becoming big brothers.

Whether that is a step like carnivore for the FBI, or it's a step, some of these marketing devices that are pushed more and more by companies on the Web, I think we badly need a system that helps protect people against any kind of intrusion, from government or non-government, that they don't want to permit, or that there doesn't exist a court order for a warrant to search. I think that remains to be seen when it is that system will come about, but I think it's badly needed.

MR. CLAWSON: If I may so, I think it's a really rather remarkable development when we find that the FBI, when it wants to gather information about individuals, has to turn to commercially available services as the best way to do that. It's not apparent to me that we as a nation have our privacy better safeguarded when it's in the hands of the private companies than in the hands of the law enforcement community. This entire culture is respect for the rule of law and balancing civil liberties against law enforcement.

MR. NESSEN: Yes, sir. Oh, let's take that gentleman over there, first, and then come to you. Okay? Yes, sir?

Q: I have two questions actually. I'm a bit surprised that none have defined terrorism, and there are dozens of acts of political violence around the world every day. How do we know that some acts are acts of terrorism and other acts of political violence are not constituted as terrorism?

I ask this question because it raises a second question. There is a perception that the American government would only be interested in acts of terrorism if it affects American interests or American citizens. For example, if Osama bin Laden had not declared war on America, had declared war on some other small country in Europe, I think he wouldn't get the attention that he's getting now. That's why I'm interested in a comment by Mr. Paul Pillar that the United States cannot fight terrorism alone. It has to rely on cooperation with countries around the world.

But I think one assumption of doing that is that the United States has to accept that there are also cases—it has to be sensitized to terrorism cases faced by its friends, even though it does not affect the interests or citizens of America. I was wondering if he would agree with that idea.

MR. PILLAR: Well, the first question about definitions, you can look in the first couple of pages of any year's editions of "Patterns" to find the US government definition that is the basis for all the statistics you see in that publication. I can't remember the exact quote, but it's basically politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatants—i.e., non-military—by either clandestine agents of a foreign government or non-governmental groups. I think that definition has served us pretty well.

I think your second point simply amplifies what I suggested earlier, and I would concur with it, that the terrorism that affects U.S. interests, and about which our policymakers need to worry, and against which our policymakers need to take action to counter, is not to be equated just with American citizens being killed or wounded.

Take the Arab-Israeli peace process as one major example. The Northern Ireland process another one, where the biggest threat to a resumption of, or a continuation of, in the case of Northern Ireland, along the road toward lasting peace is terrorism, particularly by fringe groups like the IRA in the case of Northern Ireland, or some of the extremist groups in the Palestinian context. We need to worry about that just as much.

One of the shortcomings, by the way, of U.S. law in my view is that the full and impressive investigative capabilities of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies can come into play under existing law only if there is a violation of U.S. law, which in the case of terrorism usually means U.S. citizens having to become direct victims. There are sometimes cases overseas where, looking at it as an intelligence officer dealing with a counterterrorist problem, I wish our FBI colleagues, with their very impressive investigative resources, could have been applied to certain situations in which Americans weren't killed, and it wasn't necessarily a violation of U.S. law, but U.S. interests were at least indirectly threatened. I would have loved to have seen the FBI people get to the bottom of a particular case, but perhaps we need to look at some legal changes on that part as well.

MR. NESSEN: This gentleman here I promised the next question.

Q: In the past 10 years or so we've seen a decrease in incidences that led directly to a demand in negotiations, such as kidnappings, hostage takings, hijackings. I just point out to this gentleman, I mean a lot of that is due to improvements in our counter-terrorism capabilities, as demonstrated at the Japanese embassy in Peru. But I'm curious that if you think that there's been an increase in more bombings, sabotage, and incidences in which no demand was necessarily made before the incident, and if this is a change then due to the character of groups involved in terrorism, or it's simply a tactical decision by perpetrators, or if it is due to the policy of no negotiations, as to which just incidents of violence without a demand such as bin Laden or Shinri Kyo seem to be increasing.

MR. PARACHINI: Well, one of the things you do notice is in these what are called mass casualty attacks is that people do not claim them, and that's certainly true in the series of bombings in Moscow and in Russia. For a long time Aum Shinri Kyo denied that it was involved in the attack on the Tokyo subway. Bin Laden never really claims that he's done these attacks, or he's been the mastermind, or that the accomplices have been involved, but talks in a very vague way about if indeed they were inspired to do that, they are blessed.

There is, I think, a disquieting new trend where attacks that are mass casualties are not claimed. Is it because people don't want to claim that they were responsible for killing that many people? Is it because that adds more mystery to it? Is it because there's some sort of delayed psychological benefit of knowing something and others not knowing it? It's not clear, but it's something worth understanding a great deal more.

Along those lines, the mass casualty attack, most of those have been with conventional high explosives. While there is concern, and it's hard to know what the future might be like for the use of unconventional weapons, exotic weapons, the historical pattern has been for the last 25 years to use high explosives. And indeed, the high explosives have inflicted many more casualties and fatalities than the very few incidents where some national groups have actually used these exotic weapons.

That's one of the things, as we move forward the Bush administration is faced with the challenge of, how do we anticipate the unknown and yet understand the historical pattern of where the real large number of casualties have been with conventional explosives, and that the new trend seems to be explosives are not claimed.

MR. PILLAR: Each of the factors you mentioned, in view, is partly security counter-measures. Obviously that's true of aviation security. It's a lot harder to hijack an airplane. The no negotiations under duress policy is a factor. And it's in large degree a matter of the changed objectives of terrorist groups of being out to punish people like Americans in general, as opposed to trying to achieve more specific aims overseas. They're all factors.

MR. NESSEN: Let me just follow up a second. At least our last two presidents after terrorist episodes have publicly said, we're going to track down these terrorists and find them and bring them to justice, which is not always possible. Does this in some way encourage terrorists, if they believe that they can pretty well get away with terrorism?

MR. WOOLSEY: Only if we would attack. If a Saddam is working with a bin Laden and the two of them are setting up some fall guys out there to take the rap, and either or both believes that the investigation will stop with the people who can actually be arrested and tried, then over the long term that encourages the Saddam, or bin Ladens or whomever, to do more.

Law enforcement is an important part of dealing with terrorism. The problem is, I think particularly for the last eight years, it's been almost all of what we've done. We've set aside looking at the state sponsorship issue, particularly with respect to Iraq. I think that should change. But I think that law enforcement is an important part, and I think you catch who you can and try them and so forth is certainly a useful part.

MR. CLAWSON: If I may add, I think that we have constructed a powerful incentive for any terrorist, be it a state sponsor or be it as some national group, to make sure that when a terrorist episode takes place that there's a convenient fall guy to be arrested and tried.

MR. NESSEN: Could I ask you just a secret from the CIA...?

MR. WOOLSEY: You can ask.

MR. NESSEN: There's a name for people who are in that position, the fall guy. What's the term?

MR. WOOLSEY: I would call the operation of that a false flag operation, and you know, an asset that is set out there and is unwitting and doesn't now that he's being used, he thinks he's doing all this for the glory of Islam and in fact he's being manipulated by some state actor, called an unwitting asset. Maybe, Paul, you've got some?

MR. PILLAR: Well, witting or unwitting, getting back to your original question, the fact of terrorist incidents is such, and the way they tend to be conducted is such that the little guys are the ones who are more vulnerable to being caught. They're the ones who are driving the trucks, setting the explosives, having to escape from a country. The people ultimately pulling the strings, if they're holed out in Afghanistan or some place like that are simply less catchable.

Now the awareness that the U.S. is still after the big guys and will not rest until they get them does have benefit in keeping the big guys at least off balance. But one of my colleagues made a very important point, that we shouldn't accept as closure a prosecution when all we're really getting are the little guys.

MR. NESSEN: We'll take a couple more questions. Yes, sir, this gentleman back here.

Q: My name is al-Himi (ph), and I come from VOA. I have a question for Mr. Woolsey.

It is widely alleged that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban phenomenon are the result of CIA operations during the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. We would like to know whether such phenomenon was anticipated at that time or not, and if not, why? And now that we are dealing with it and they are threatening the region, in the halls of the United Nations, what do you recommend to the new government in the United States to deal with that situation?

MR. WOOLSEY: Well, the answer is I don't know because I was only out at the CIA for two years, from early '93 to '95, and when we were intervening in Afghanistan in support of the mujahedeen I was practicing law across the street here. But I'll share my judgment with you.

My judgment is that we definitely should have intervened in Afghanistan, that the aid to the mujahedeen was one of the two or three things that most broke the will of the Soviet Union, and that that was one of the positive steps that the United States took during the Cold War. The only covert action by the CIA that I think exceeded that in importance in the Cold War is the one Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel have said was the single most important thing the US did during the Cold War and that's Radio Free Europe. But I think the intervention on behalf of the mujahedeen was positive.

Now because we were working with Pakistan, and there was a propensity for us, as I understand from the histories of this, to work particularly closely with some of the groups in Afghanistan that were most friendly with Pakistan, and with Pakistani military, and some of those ended up being extremely - very much on the extreme side of the mujahedeen.

Also, I think you can fault the United States for not having stayed after the Afghan war was done and led an international group, and the Taliban representative here in Washington said this not long ago, we really should have done what we could to help rebuild Afghanistan and not just left after the Soviets were pushed out.

But I don't think you can lay at the feet of the American government the current radicalism of Osama bin Laden, or the fact that Taliban persists in protecting him. He had some role, not as major a one as I think he claimed, in the operations against the Soviets. He has on his own decided that we are a major threat because we are in the Persian Gulf and the Mideast and has turned very hostile.

But I think that it would not have been the right thing for the United States to do, even if it had foreseen some substantial difficulties in the '90s, for the United States in the mid-80s to say, wait a minute, we may create some kind of blowback here, so let's not help the mujahedeen throw the Soviets out. The Soviets had taken Afghanistan, it was a major move by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They had to be thrown out, and I think the US government and the CIA did the right thing in helping the mujahedeen throw them out.

MR. NESSEN: One last question. Right here.

Q: I have a question for Copley News Service. There's a big push here in town to find some way of centralizing the anti-terrorist effort, particularly domestic—protecting the United States against domestic terrorism. A quick look at Mr. Pillar's book indicates that you're not a big fan of some greater centralization. I'd just like to bounce that off the panel, what's the best approach for the US government to take in trying to improve our domestic protection against terrorism?

MR. PARACHINI: Rearranging the deck chairs in my view is never necessarily the answer. I know there are a number of pieces of legislation and a number of commission reports have made suggestions. I think the current interagency system works pretty well. I think there are some missing tools, some of which were called for in the National Commission on Terrorism that Ambassador Woolsey served on, some of which is a re-shift of emphasis, being very conscious of the toolbox has got to be full. It's not just hitting Osama bin Laden with a cruise missile or declaratory statement. There's got to be a full range of tools.

I think we'd be better served being more conscious about making sure we use the full range of tools in our counter-terrorism effort than trying to find some sort of perfect governmental structure. Frankly, Dick Clark, who has served as the coordinator in the White House in the last several years, a fellow with considerable bureaucratic skills and a huge persona, I think was pretty effective at moving that administration forward. That's all driven by personality. Has nothing to do with the structure. I'm not sure in government—Ambassador Woolsey has served in government in different administrations in different places. The structure is never necessarily how you solve it, but there are some principles and some policy that the people define, I think is more important.

I think Paul's book, frankly, helped shift our thinking from broader than just kissing with a cruise missile or declaring that this group is bad. We've got to use all of the tools.

MR. NESSEN: Thanks to our panel for lots of good information and insights, and thanks to the audience for attending and participating.