Caution, Not Panic

Government warnings of potential anti-American terrorist operations coinciding with the end of the century were given chilling emphasis with last week’s arrest of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian, who was trying to enter the United States from Canada with false papers and bomb-making materials hidden in his car. Meanwhile, in Jordan and Pakistan, authorities have jailed scores of people suspected of having links to the exiled Saudi Arabian militant Osama bin Laden, whose followers are accused of bombing two U.S. embassies in Africa last year and who has told his followers that they have a religious duty to kill Americans.

Ressam is believed by authorities to have been a courier assigned to deliver the explosives to someone in one of the Western states. If true, that describes a conspiracy and not the act of a single fanatic. The United States and Canada are proceeding on that assumption. Security has been stepped up along the Canadian border and the frontier with Mexico as well, but there is no way to know who might have illegally entered the country in the last few weeks or months or what deadly materials they might have brought with them.

Until recently the FBI had focused on the potential threat of terrorist violence by Americans--antigovernment activists and religious cultists energized by planned millennial observances. More recently, noting the coincidence of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the end of the century, and using intelligence gathered overseas, the FBI has expanded its scrutiny of Middle Eastern extremists, but it has become increasingly difficult to penetrate the close-knit structure of many terrorist groups.

Heightened vigilance is surely required. The bombings of New York’s World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City federal building, the first by Middle East extremists and the second by antigovernment American terrorists, demonstrated our national vulnerability. The effort to smuggle explosives from Canada is evidence of a continuing threat.

As a free society we have no choice but to live with an inevitable measure of exposure to terrorism. The alternative--to expediently adopt the intrusive and repressive measures that are the hallmarks of a police state--would mean an end to our civil liberties. One way to foster those liberties is to shun ignorant and destructive stereotyping. Osama bin Laden does not typify Arabs and Muslims either here or the Middle East.

The government has advised Americans at home and abroad to be on the alert. Reasonable caution is in order. Panic most certainly is not.