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WASHINGTON,
Sept. 11 (UPI) — Who ordered and planned the hijacking of the
airliners to crash them into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon?
The list of possible culprits is very long and encircles the entire
world. But the most likely ones are only too obvious.
The attacks
certainly appear to point to Islamic extremist groups in the Middle
East for three obvious reasons.
First, they
required an exceptionally high degree of intelligence preparation
and planning. The $60 billion a year U.S. intelligence community
was taken entirely by surprise — a particularly bitter irony
since the Central Intelligence Agency was expressly set up in 1947
to coordinate U.S. intelligence and thereby make sure that another
devastating surprise attack like Pearl Harbor could never happen
again.
Second, the
techniques involved in the catastrophically successful attacks were
those that have pioneered, developed and favored by Middle East-based
Islamic terrorists for the past 30 years.
They involved
a combination of the old terror technique of hijacking civilian
airliners from the late 1960s that was pioneered by secular, leftist
revolutionary Palestinian groups with the chilling abandon and ruthlessness
of the suicide bomber.
Suicide bombing
was pioneered to devastating effect by the Iranian-backed Shi'ite
Hezbollah (Party of God) movement in Lebanon in the early 1980s.
Hundreds of U.S. Marines and French peacekeepers were killed in
almost simultaneous terror truck bomb assaults on their headquarters
in Beirut in 1983. The entire top CIA analyst team on Middle East
terrorism was wiped out in another such attack on the U.S. Embassy
in Beirut around that time. But now, for the first time, these two
techniques have been combined with staggering effectiveness.
Third, the
attack on the World Trade Towers is the second of its kind. The
earlier 1993 attack was far more limited, but equally audacious
in scope. The plan of the terrorists then — and they were indeed
from the Middle East — was to bring both towers crashing down
and then unleash a cloud of cyanide gas to massacre the survivors.
They hoped for a death toll of 100,000.
It is not yet
clear what the death told of Wednesday's attacks will be but the
Trade Towers have indeed been destroyed. The death toll is clearly
going to be in the thousands at least. At least 50,000 people worked
in those buildings. Hundreds of terrified, helpless, innocent passengers
died in the hijacked airliners that flew into the Trade Towers and
the Pentagon. The casualties look certain to be at least 10 or 20
times the total number of dead in the Oklahoma City federal building
bombing, until Wednesday the most deadly terrorist attack in U.S.
history.
Osama bin Laden
in Afghanistan has been named by successive U.S. administrations
as the so-called "Godfather of Terror" over the past decade.
He continues
to be based in Afghanistan and the Clinton administration has blamed
him for the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
which killed hundreds of people — most them Kenyan and Tanzanian
civilians — a few years ago. He will be an obvious suspect.
However, former
House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich has already called
Wednesday's shocking attacks examples of "state-sponsored terrorism"
and he could well prove to be right.
Many leading
U.S. experts on terrorism in both the intelligence services and
academia have long believed that Bin Laden by himself was never
capable of being more than a middle man and a convenient 'cut out"
for state sponsored terror attacks. In reality, they believe, many
of the worst attacks attributed to him, were more likely financed
and ordered by such nations as Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Indeed, Laurie
Mylroie, a biographer of Saddam Hussein, has even published a book
arguing that Saddam ordered the first World Trade Center bombing
in 1993 and that his intelligence organization played a major role
in carrying it out.
But under the
Clinton administration, the U.S. intelligence and security services
were extremely reluctant to investigate such possibilities. And
even if the Bush administration were to take such theories seriously
now, proving them would certainly be very difficult.
The obvious
willingness of the actual airliner hijackers to sacrifice their
own lives certainly suggests that the planners of the attacks were
able to draw on a cadre of reliable, fanatical, dedicated followers
ready to sacrifice their own lives. There are only three such significant
reservoirs of such groups currently active in international terrorism
and all of them are in the Middle East and intensely hostile to
the United States.
They are: Hezbollah
in southern Lebanon, which is supported by Iran; Hamas and Islamic
Jihad, which has launched a devastating wave of suicide bomb attacks
against Israeli civilians in recent months; and Bin Laden's own
group based in Afghanistan, where it is protected by the ruling
Taliban regime.
Having said
that, caution should be added. There was a wave of anti-Muslim and
anti-Iran anger across the United States after the Oklahoma City
bombing. It quickly emerged, however, that that attack had been
carried out by white American terrorists. Timothy MacVeigh was executed
this year for carrying out that attack.
Rushes to judgement
are easy, and the complexities of who was really behind such terrible
outrages are often debated for years afterwards. But on the other
hand, crimes of such an outrageous scale, with such devastating
and tragic consequences demand rapid national retaliation and response.
The popular pressure to do so is usually overwhelming.
The U.S. security
and intelligence services were tragically inadequate to anticipate
and prevent Wednesday's horrors. But the national surge of energy
and rage that is certain to go into the investigation is likely
to point decisively to the most likely culprits -whoever they are
- far sooner than many talking heads taking refuge in their usual
cliches think.
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