“Unlike ballistic missile defense, which holds a privileged position in U.S. defense planning (and spending), countering the covert NBC threat has fallen through the cracks of American national security strategy”1.

“In its actions and policies, the U.S. government does not treat the danger of covert NBC aggression as a first-order national security challenge, occasional rhetoric aside. There are critical deficiencies in the current U.S. capacity to cope with the covert NBC threat. Important high-leverage policy areas currently receive insufficient attention and funding”2.

“The overall U.S. policy response to the problem of NBC terrorism and covert attack has been inadequate in comparison to the importance of the threat”3.

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جهل المسؤولين لحجم المشكلة

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According to the experts, one political obstacle that stands in the way of handling the terrorist danger is “public and official ignorance about the nature of the threat and what can be done to reduce it… U.S. analysts and officials need to stop dismissing NBC weapons in general, and covert delivery in particular, as the stuff of farfetched nightmarish scenarios”4.

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للسلطات أوّليّات أخرى تتقدّم خطر الإرهاب بأسلحة الدمار الشامل ومعالجة مفاعيله

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The recommendations proposed by the experts face a political challenge that may prevent their implementation. The proposed response to the covert NBC threat “does not strongly support any high-priority objective of U.S. foreign or domestic policy. It does not directly promote democracy or free trade, increase stability to Europe or Asia, or bring peace to troubled regions… Implementing the agenda [the experts’ recommendations] would yield significant collateral benefits in the areas of disaster management, public health, and intelligence capabilities, but these are not high-priority issues for the nation’s political leaders”5.

أعذار المسؤولين المقصّرين، بعد وقوع الكارثة، ستكون أعذاراً فارغة، وسوف يحاسَبون على تقصيرهم.

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The experts warn the politicians that in the aftermath of an NBC attack, “the national leaders who were uninterested in hedging against an uncertain threat might find themselves being held accountable for the nation’s failed preventive efforts and low level of preparedness. The excuse given for not having done more beforehand will ring hollow.”6

المخصّصات المالية للتصدّي للإرهاب متواضعة جدّاً بالنسبة إلى الميزانية العامة لوزارة الدفاع. وهذا يثبت أن الدولة غير جادّة بالفعل في إعتبارها مكافحة الإرهاب أوّلية

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“Ballistic missiles are the least likely method of delivery, and yet Congress regularly allocates more money to ballistic-missile defense than the Pentagon says it can use _roughly ten times what is spent to prevent WMD terrorism. Ballistic missile defenses may turn out to be highly beneficial, but they cannot stop bombs brought into this country on cars, planes, or boats”7.

“More research is needed on ways to detect, disable, and mitigate the effects of WMD. The U.S. National Laboratories have vast research capabilities that, because of inadequate funding, are not being fully exploited… To combat nuclear terrorism, funding is needed to improve and implement nuclear forensics capabilities and to improve the detection of nuclear materials”8.

“The Num-Lugar-Domenici amendment was a vital first step in the U.S. effort to address the problem of domestic or terrorist NBC attack, but further efforts will be needed if the United States is to reduce its vulnerability to weapons of mass destruction. In particular, the funding base of the domestic preparedness programs is insufficient to achieve the objective sought by Congress, and the Department of Defense is not fully committed to this mission”9.

The Num-Lugar-Domenici Amendment, which was unanimously passed by the Senate in July 1996, “assigned responsibility to the nation’s domestic preparedness against domestic NBC incidents to the Department of Defense. The law directed the president to take immediate action “to enhance the capability of the Federal Government to prevent and respond to terrorist incidents involving weapons of mass destruction” and “to provide enhanced support to improve the capabilities of State and local emergency response agencies to prevent and respond to such incidents at both the national and the local level”10.

“To begin meeting this objective [improving the capabilities of State and local emergency response agencies], Congress provided approximately $50 million in supplemental funding to the Department of Defense in fiscal year 1997”11. This is a very small amount when we remember that the yearly defense budget for the United States is not less than $300 billion12.

According to the experts, any vigorous and balanced action against the covert NBC threat “requires expenditures in domains that have traditionally had little if anything to do with the military, such as first-responder preparedness and epidemiological surveillance. The congressional committees concerned with national security are protective of the defense budget, and many legislators (and generals and admirals) are reflexively opposed to using the defense budget for purposes outside of traditional military missions…Politicians still struggle more to preserve existing projects that benefit their constituents than to find new ones that necessitate compensatory offsets in the federal budget”13.

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سْتراتيجية الحرب الباردة لم تعد صالحة. يتصدّى المسؤولون لخطر الإرهاب بأسلحة الدمار الشامل، والذي يستهدف المجتمع المدني في أميركا، بسْتراتيجية تجاوزها الزمن وهي من مخلَّفات "الحرب الباردة"

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“We Americans should be asking ourselves whether this allocation of resources [to ballistic missile defense] is efficient. Similarly, we should be wondering about the relative security we are buying by expanding NATO or building Steath bombers, both of which were more appropriate to Cold War threats than they are to threats of terrorism, and both of which are far more expensive than the remedies proposed in this chapter. Deciding to build five more Steath bombers would save an estimated $10 billion, more than enough to fund all the policies recommended here”14.

“NEST’s ability to deal with the full range of terrorist nuclear devices was limited and funding was inadequate”15.

“The government is similarly unprepared to deal with acts of chemical or biological terrorism… While the U.S. government is attempting to improve its ability to respond to chemical and biological incidents, its efforts to date have been “problematic” and the effectiveness of the programs is ‘uncertain’”16.

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عدم جهوزية الأجهزة المختصّة للتعامل مع العمليات الإرهابية ومفاعيلها

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“The first responders to any domestic NBC incident are very likely to come from state and local agencies, and their ability to recognize and react appropriately to an NBC incident is critical. Individual states, however, lack the resources and competencies needed to prepare adequately for the consequences of NBC attacks’17.

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تضارب الصلاحيات وضعف التنسيق بين الأجهزة end

“Finally, PDD-39 and other federal attempts to improve the coordination of NBC preparedness and response are flawed by their failure to delineate clearly and consistently the responsibilities of the different levels of government: federal, state, and local”18.

“An array of federal, state, and local government agencies possess capabilities that are relevant to countering the covert NBC threat, but there is no overarching strategy, and no coherent organizational structure, for pulling these disparate capabilities together to meet the challenge posed by the possible covert use of weapons of mass destruction”19.

“The United States has no coherent national strategy for dealing with the covert nuclear, biological, or chemical threat. No agency in the U.S. government is currently required or equipped to conduct the strategic planning across multiple jurisdictional boundaries that is necessary to reduce U.S. vulnerability to covert NBC aggression… This issue, however, is not presently a high-level priority of the U.S. government, and is likely to become one only if a domestic NBC attack occurs”20.

“U.S. government agencies maintain at least twelve databases related to WMD terrorism. But agencies rarely disseminate their findings. Often they are unaware of their counterparts’ efforts, and the same data are collected twice (or more than twice). Worse still, there is no analysis of worldwide terrorism that includes both domestic and international terrorism. Efforts to share data internationally are also inadequate”21.

“The most comprehensive analysis of trends in terrorism is performed by the CIA. But the CIA, claiming inadequate funding, has not made a serious effort [to analyze the data]…If the U.S. government is to have any hope of predicting and preventing WMD terrorism, these data must be analyzed properly. Moreover, the costs of analysis are minimal; it is a waste of the taxpayers’ money to gather data and then leave it analyzed”22.

“Of particular concern was the difficulty of cooperation between agencies whose priorities and incentives occasionally conflict”23.

“Sharing within our responsible agencies is far more important than separate credit or budget enhancements. We cannot afford to have the FBI deny the CIA information it has obtained, or the CIA to deny the FBI the information it has.”24

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رأي الخبراء في كفاءة الـ"ف.ب.أي": هذا الجهاز غير مؤهّل للدور المناط به في مكافحة الإرهاب

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The FBI is “an agency whose weapons of mass destruction have never been a core competency. The FBI has always had responsibility for protecting national security in addition to enforcing U.S. law, but its national security mission has been predominantly one of counterintelligence, that is, identifying and prosecuting foreign spies within national security agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense…The FBI has substantially less experience in preparing for or conducting large-scale, multi-agency operations, as would be required in an operational response to a domestic NBC incident”25.

The FBI is “a highly self-contained bureaucracy and is notoriously reluctant to share information with other government agencies”26.

“All these factors combine to make the FBI poorly suited for the role of planning and implementing a broad-based U.S. program for combating the full range of possible covert NBC threats. The basic weakness of PDD-39 [Presidential Decision Directive] is that…it gives responsibility for managing the important task of improving U.S. response capabilities to the wrong agency [FBI]”27.

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1. Falkenrath, page 254
2. Falkenrath, page 261

3. Falkenrath, page 261

4. Falkenrath, page 337

5. Falkenrath, page 338

6. Falkenrath, page 339

7. Stern, pages 128-129

8. Stern, page 158

9. Falkenrath, page 263

10. Falkenrath, page 262

11. Falkenrath, page 262

12. See Stern, page 3

13. Falkenrath, page 338

14. Stern, page 129

15. Stern, page 141

16. Stern, page 141

17. Falkenrath, page 274

18. Falkenrath, page 274

19. Falkenrath, page 261

20. Falkenrath, pages 264-265

21. Stern, page 139

22. Stern, page 139

23. Stern, page 140

24. Heymann, p.156

25. Falkenrath, page 272

26. Falkenrath, page 273

27. Falkenrath, page 273

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