December 02, 2008

New WMD Report Echoes 2001 Panel's Warnings on Terrorism   Even as Barack Obama was introducing his national security team to the nation Monday, Americans learned of a chilling new report detailing the scope of the global threat of weapons of mass destruction. Dramatically titled "World at Risk," the study led by former Senators Bob Graham (D-FL) and Jim Talent (R-MO) predicted a better than even chance that the world would experience a WMD attack within the next five years. As if President-Elect Obama didn't already have enough to worry about, the report eerily echoed the dire - and hauntingly accurate - February 2001 warnings by the Hart-Rudman Commission about the growing terrorism threat to the United States.   The nine-member Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (web site here) offered its grim assessment (PDF here) that the United States and its allies must act quickly to avert the disaster of an attack carried out with biological, nuclear or other unconventional weapons somewhere in the world. The six month study, mandated by Congress to address a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, opens with both a dark forecast and a call to action: The Commission believes that unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013. While the Graham panel concluded "terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon," nuclear weapons programs in countries such as Iran and North Korea and the growing risk poorly secured biological pathogens suggest, as the New York Times put it, "unconventional threats are fast outpacing the defenses arrayed to confront them." And at the very time "America's margin of safety is shrinking, not growing," the panel warned, an increasingly unstable Pakistan will be at the center of Obama administration policymakers' nightmares: Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan. It has nuclear weapons and a history of unstable governments, and parts of its territory are currently a safe haven for al Qaeda and other terrorists. Moreover, given Pakistan's tense relationship with India, its buildup of nuclear weapons is exacerbating the prospect of a dangerous nuclear arms race in South Asia that could lead to a nuclear conflict... ...Pakistan is an ally, but there is a grave danger it could also be an unwitting source of a terrorist attack on the United States - possibly with weapons of mass destruction. If this grim alarm to an incoming administration sounds familiar, it should. Back in 2001, the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century led by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman offered the new President George W. Bush a similarly frightening assessment of the looming terrorism threat. The nonpartisan Hart-Rudman panel delivered its Phase III report, "Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change," in February 2001. Months before the September 11th attacks, the Commission presciently warned of a mass casualty terror attack on the United States homeland: The combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack. A direct attack against American citizens on American soil is likely over the next quarter century. The risk is not only death and destruction but also a demoralization that could undermine U.S. global leadership... ...The stakes are high. We of this Commission believe that many thousands of American lives, U.S. leadership among the community of nations, and the fate of U.S. national security itself are at risk unless the President and the Congress join together to implement the recommendations set forth in this report. Sadly, as I wrote in March 2004 ("Cognitive Dissonance, Terrorism and 9/11"), the American national security establishment in general and the Bush administration in particular viewed threats to the U.S. from the prism of the Cold War and were simply incapable of processing, filtering and understanding the signals of the growing terror threat to the homeland. Perhaps no episode better summed up this cognitive dissonance than then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's jaw-dropping statement on May 16, 2002: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile. All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking." (Of course, as former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke testified to the 9/11 Commission, the U.S. had worried about planes-as-missiles dating back to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Then again, it was Rice who glibly responded to Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste regarding the now famous August 6, 2001 presidential daily brief, "I believe the title was, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.'")   The Hart-Rudman commission and its unheeded warnings are ancient history. But while the Bush administration was gripped by what the 9/11 panel chairman Tom Keane deemed a "failure of imagination," there is cause for hope that the incoming Obama team will do better. For openers, as Marc Ambinder noted, many of the new Commissions members, including Wendy Sherman, Graham Allison and Tim Roemer, have advised Obama on national security issues. (Allison's book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, was widely praised as a blueprint for countering the threat of nuclear proliferation and terrorism by Iran and other states and their potential terror clients.) As Ambinder suggests, "don't be surprised if, to Obama, the threats of failed states and WMD proliferation are indelibly linked."   None of which is to suggest that 2008 is a replay of 2001. The seeming failure of the United States under President Bush to heed Senators Hart and Rudman seven and a half years ago by no means implies the U.S. necessarily faces an imminent and devastating WMD strike as the Graham-Talent commission now worries. In the aftermath of the tragic 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington and with a seemingly more sober administration about to come to power, Americans should hope their government is better prepared. —Perrspective 07:47 PM

Also from Boston Globe : 

New leadership planned to fight WMD terrorism

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff  |  December 3, 2008

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama plans to appoint a new White House official to coordinate efforts to prevent terrorists from obtaining nuclear or biological weapons, advisers say, giving the highest priority to thwarting a catastrophic attack that a bipartisan panel warns could come in the next five years.

Naming a top deputy whose sole mission is to oversee the government's wide-ranging programs to stop such an attack would mark a significant break with the Bush administration, which in resisting such a post has maintained that US efforts to reduce nuclear stockpiles and safeguard deadly pathogens are adequate.

A law requiring the position, passed by Congress more than a year ago and signed into law by President Bush, has been ignored for more than 15 months, in part because Bush opposes giving the Senate the power to confirm the official.

But Obama, whose first foreign trip as a US senator was to assess initiatives to lock down nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, believes the programs lack coordination, are underfunded, and need a top official supervising them, according to three advisers with knowledge of the transition team's deliberations.

"I think it is a good idea and will probably happen" soon after Obama is sworn in Jan. 20, said one of those advisers, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations with the president-elect.

The need for a top-level official to coordinate nonproliferation programs - now spread across numerous agencies - is expected to gain new urgency today with the release of the sobering new report that warns that without drastic new measures, the world faces the real prospect of a nuclear or biological attack by 2013. Leaders of the commission that drafted the report said that terrorists have made it clear that the United States is their number one target.

"The simple reality is that the risks that confront us today are evolving faster than our multilayered responses," according to the report, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe. "Many thousands of dedicated people across all agencies of our government are working hard to protect this country, and their efforts have had a positive impact. But the terrorists have been active, too - and in our judgment America's margin of safety is shrinking, not growing."

Vice President-elect Joe Biden, who has also been active in the Senate on nuclear nonproliferation, and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, named Monday by Obama as homeland security secretary, are to be briefed today by the commission.

The 160-page report - ordered by Congress last year as a road map for the next administration and completed after more than six months of study and access to classified intelligence briefings - also calls for Obama to make it a top priority to stop nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea, using diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force; to beef up international efforts to slow the spread of nuclear weapons; and to work with Pakistan to eliminate terrorist safe havens and secure nuclear and biological materials in that country.

"Terrorist organizations are intent on acquiring nuclear weapons," it says. "Anyone with access to the Internet can easily obtain designs for building a nuclear bomb. Our crucial task is to secure the material before terrorists can steal or buy it on the black market."

Pakistan is the most likely source of terrorists armed with nuclear or biological weapons, said former senator Bob Graham of Florida, cochairman of the commission along with former senator Jim Talent of Missouri. "It is the potential bombshell where terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will intersect," Graham said yesterday on CNN.

The report also raises new alarms about the prospect of a biological attack, saying that too little focus has been given to controlling the ingredients for biological weapons - even though they pose a "more likely threat" and facilities with pathogens, especially civilian labs, are less carefully guarded than nuclear facilities.

Terrorists could obtain the know-how to fashion biological weapons by finding scientists willing to share or sell their knowledge, the commission warns. "The United States should be less concerned that terrorists will become biologists and far more concerned that biologists will become terrorists," the report says.

The shortfalls in prevention measures are due in large part to the lack of leadership at the highest levels of the US government, according to the commission, which urged the appointment of the top White House coordinator, either in the National Security Council or the vice president's office, though it recommends that Congress change the law so that the official does not require Senate confirmation.

"We have to make sure our own government is working effectively and somebody is waking up every day with this as their urgent call," said former US representative Tim Roemer of Indiana, a member of the commission, which also includes Obama's State Department transition chief, former ambassador Wendy Sherman. Roemer also served on the panel that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks; it recommended the weapons study.

The current structure is too haphazard, according to the commission, and "no single person is in charge of and accountable for preventing WMD proliferation and terrorism, with insight into all of committees and interagency working groups focused on these issues."

Obama, according to his advisers, has decided that will change. The specific details of a White House coordinator will be worked out between the new president, his national security adviser, James L. Jones, and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, according to one Obama confidant. But the president-elect provided a preview in a little-noticed paper issued by his campaign in July.

"Everything involving nuclear weapons is inherently presidential and will require presidential leadership," the paper stated, adding that if elected Obama would "appoint a deputy national security advisor to be in charge of coordinating all US programs aimed at reducing the risk of nuclear terrorism and weapons proliferation."

Such high-level attention and authority is long overdue, according to many specialists.

"Neither the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, nor the Congress under Democratic or Republican leadership has given preventive nonproliferation programs the priority they deserve," said Brian Finlay, a senior associate at the nonpartisan Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com. 

Also on C-Span Dec 4