I turned off cable news and went to the Internet. Not to the U.S. media, but to the Middle East. Unfortunately, the Arabs may be better at terrorism than swift propaganda. None of the Middle East news sources other than the Israelis had updated sites. The major Israeli daily "Ha’aretz" was running the following on the front page of its English edition:

"New York mayor says ’tremendous number of lives lost;" reports that aircraft were hijacked; White House evacuated; Israel evacuates all missions around the world; aircraft across U.S. grounded; Bush calls Trade Center assault "apparent terror attack;" 3 weeks ago Osama Ben Laden warned he would carry out unprecedented attack against U.S. for supporting Israel.

"Israel evacuated all its missions around the world. Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer hinted that the attack was carried out by Islamic terrorists, saying that "the threat of radical Islam is the central threat to the free world because its goal is to destroy everything connected to the values of western democracies."

Ha’aretz, 9/11/01 (Israeli newspaper, English edition)

We should remember our mistaken first impulse after the Murrah building bombing in Oklahoma City. We jumped to the conclusion that Ben Laden or some other Middle East group ordered it. It turned out to be exclusively of domestic origin, with no links outside the United States. The Kennedy assassination, although still in the minds of some linked to Castro and Russia, was cooked up in the disturbed mind of Lee Harvey Oswald, if we are to believe our government, which we shouldn’t necessarily. So far, except for the botched World Trade bombing of February 26, 1991, no attack in the United States has come from outside our borders.

I don’t think this time either that we should concentrate on Osama Ben Laden to the exclusion of other possibilities. The very fact that three weeks ago he threatened a massive attack on the United States is precisely the reason to doubt it.

Unless Ben Laden is the prisoner of his own passions, the last thing he would do is free the Administration to give all-out support to Israel because now the interests of the United States and Israel move to a convergence. While this may alienate friendly Arab states in the region, our European allies, including France, will be less likely to undercut our position.

Ben Laden already has one strike against him, which means the Israelis have one strike for them. His 1998 bomb attacks against the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam claimed 224 lives and Ben Laden is believed to be involved in the sinking of the U.S.S. Cole through his supporters in Yemen.

If the perpetrator is a Middle East faction or even nation, it is more likely Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan or even Pakistan, not directly but by provisioning and supporting the conspiracy or one of the two Palestinian terrorist organizations. Intelligence agencies should never dismiss any possibility.

The Administration benefits enormously, so much so that the Democrat opposition which has been so effective is left in disarray for the elections of 2002. Even the state of the economy takes a back seat to the "demands" of national unity.

Should Ben Ladin or one of the Palestinian groups turn out to be the culprit, the other beneficiary especially with previously cool Western European nations like France is Israel.

How did the hijackers get on four airplanes on the same day at approximately the same time, two on different planes at Logan in Boston? Airport security has been a joke all these years if it only stops busy travelers but is immune to the very people it is supposedly designed to stop.

I am a bit perplexed why our intelligence community, given its size, liberal appropriations and the superb quality of its technology, had no hint of this coordinated attack. If they did, then they repeated the mistake made at Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941. The electronic media adopted that as the point of reference to yesterday’s Manhattan massacre. We knew from breaking the Japanese code that an attack was imminent. We were just too cocksure it would be the Philippines or Singapore that we took no precautions in the Hawaiian Islands. For being taken by surprise yesterday, some policymakers’ heads must roll in the CIA, FBI and FAA.

Nixon’s famous tapes had their 18 ½ minute gap. Today’s was 18 minutes. The government’s Project Echelon scans in real time all individual email messages as they stream through the Internet. Why couldn’t interceptor fighters be scrambled in less than 18 minutes? There is no excuse for the second plane bringing down the other twin tower. The first should have pushed the entire North American Air Defense System [NORAD] to highest alert.

The attackers may be unconnected to the Middle East. The increasingly violent "Green" movement, domestic and European fringe ideological groups with access to the most sophisticated technology cannot be discounted. As the Middle East has taken stage center, hemispheric groups have receded from attention. Targets in Columbia and Mexico and in the United States of "the War on Drugs" have motivation. They certainly have the money and the means. Even some presently governing Quebec have unapologetically practiced terror on a wide scale in their attempt to gain independence, which leaves Puerto Rican extremists. And Africa is not a continent in turmoil for political and health reasons to be left off the list of possibilities.

Worst of all, some group somewhere may hold a gripe against the United States that we haven’t heard from yet or don’t see as directed specifically against the United States, but for local independence, environmentalism or against global capitalism. The group may be totally unknown to the media, although hopefully not to our intelligence agencies. The Islamic Abu Sayyaf rebels in the Philippines are thought to have ties to the Middle East, They have kidnapped western and Asian hostages.

The crime may take years to solve and to identify the perpetrators beyond "a reasonable doubt." We will then look more uneasily at each other. Security will take a front seat to individual rights and we will have more Project Echelons. If the suicide pilots had the skill to pass like ghosts through our elaborate airport security I wouldn’t be too sanguine that they will have left too many footprints behind.

And what is this about teaching them a lesson they will not easily forgot? If our intelligence agencies think like average Americans and assume that our views of life, death and pain are universal, we are in big trouble. This is the Holy Jihad. These young men are in a hurry to get into heaven and take everyone they care about with them. That is what Israel learned. That is what we learned with the Kamikaze pilots during World War II. Retaliation will confirm their view of the United States as Satan and only intensify their fury to bring the United States and the West to its heels. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t retaliate. It means retaliation is not the panacea. We must develop methods to stop such people from carrying out their missions, not punish them afterwards.

Whoever attacked the United States, they not only succeeded in killing probably more than 10,000 in the World Trade towers and on the planes alone and destroying property and upsetting routine. The biggest casualty is the Bill of Rights and the biggest gainers are those who for years have been waiting for an excuse to criminalize every aspect of ordinary life, to invade our privacy and monitor our every Neighbors will now presume each other guilty until the suspect for whatever reason convinces the government and their neighbors that they are innocent. But no one can ever lay such suspicions to rest since so many have no basis in fact to begin with. movement. We have already given up many Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment protections under the existing anti-terrorism law pushed into law by Clinton. But we haven’t even gotten the security we were promised in exchange for giving up freedoms.

This horrific day has little to redeem itself except if someone directly involved were to step forward quickly and incriminate his/her co-conspirators.

Andrew E. Carlan
Farmingdale, New York

Mr. Carlan is practicing lawyer with a website on New York divorce and custody commentaries as well as essays of more general interest. He is also a regular columnist for several other websites. His articles have appeared in Newsday, the New York Times and he writes regularly for the Nassau Lawyer

You can e-mail your comments to Andrew at acarlan@optonline.net.

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