Chasing Terrorism by Subcontractor

The great millenium bug scare will probably be one of the world’s great nonevents, but there is a genuine reason for U.S. intelligence to fear that the new year might be inaugurated by spectacular bombings in several American cities.

The first indication that Islamic terrorists had marked the date on their calendars came from Jordan, where a ring of local extremists was rounded up earlier this month.

In Jordan, as elsewhere, the larger community of Islamic fundamentalists includes both very large social and political groups that do not themselves engage in any form of terrorism--although they defend and fund it--and violent Muslims who do nothing else. In Jordan, as elsewhere, their targets are mostly local rather than foreign: women who defy their village version of Islamic norms, the rare intellectual who dares to examine Islam critically and, above all, governments that are insufficiently Islamic--as all of them except for Afghanistan’s Taliban apparently are, including ultra-strict Saudi Arabia.

In Jordan, as elsewhere, local security outfits try to keep track of what the extremists are doing and saying. One great problem is precisely that the two hardly correlate: Agents and intercepts keep picking up word of supposed imminent attacks that never materialize, making it very hard to detect the real threats. Overheated young men, with nothing much else to do, talk a lot and do little. Even with a multitude of Israeli targets within spitting distance, the various Hamas groups in Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank only pull off the occasional bombing or murder, never beginning to compete with Israel’s road accidents when it comes to the total casualties they inflict.

Evidently there was some specifically persuasive talk that triggered the arrests in Jordan, very likely intercepted telephone or e-mail dialogues in which American targets were mentioned. That is a very significant indicator because Jordan’s extremists have acted--if at all--against local and Israeli targets but never, so far, against American ones. The implication was that a general contractor somewhere outside Jordan--Osama bin Laden or his equivalent--was seeking to enlist Jordanian activists to serve as his subcontractors. It followed logically that there would be other subcontractors elsewhere, in fact several of them, because Jordan’s extremists are quite low in the rankings as compared to the Shiite Hezbollah, Pakistan’s Taliban admirers, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood offshoots, the Gaza-based Hamas, Iran’s official terrorists operated by Pasdaran headquarters, and Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group, or GIA.

At that point, the threat to American targets already was assessed as very serious, but it was still believed that this did not mean targets in the United States itself; the State Department warning that went out, in fact, focused on the threat to Americans abroad.

As the leading Christian nation and the prime source of seductive Western culture, the U.S. is of course the great enemy of Muslim extremists everywhere, quite aside from its Israel connection. Yet there have been very few attacks in the U.S. simply because it is far away and its border controls are known to be quite strict for travelers arriving by air or sea. That the U.S.-Mexico border can be crossed easily in many places is well-known, but Mexico is a difficult country for Muslim extremists because it does not contain any welcoming community of Muslim immigrants of any size.

Terrorists arriving into Mexico would have to connect by themselves with the people-smugglers to cross into the U.S. The standard operating procedure for crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally is to walk across, making it difficult to carry serious quantities of bomb-making materials.

None of these obstacles apply to Canada, as the world now knows: There are several different Islamic immigrant communities there. And security controls are famously lax because politically correct Canadians do not differentiate between 76-year-old Madame Dupont coming to visit her grandchildren and bearded young men from Islamic countries.

As soon as Ahmed Ressam was arrested at the Port Angeles ferry crossing in Washington state on Dec. 17, the theory that was formulated after the arrests in Jordan was both confirmed and redefined: Yes, a general contractor was trying to mount a concerted terrorist offensive on a very large scale by enlisting (and financing) allies worldwide, but no, his targets were not merely American but, in fact, in the U.S.

Further, it seemed likely that several different cities were targeted because Ressam would not have planned to travel by air with his explosives, suggesting that Seattle was his assigned target.

Next, there was the arrest in Beecher’s Falls, Vt., of Bouabide Chamchi on Dec. 19. By then it was known that Ressam had at least two other associates who may or may not be in the United States already. All of these, however, originate from just one sub-contractor, the Montreal affiliates of Algeria’s GIA, by far the most violent Islamic group in the world these days--though significantly, it too has no prior record of attacking American targets.

At this point, the very visible intensification of border controls is being accompanied by much less public efforts by the FBI and local police to detect active Islamic terrorists within the immigrant communities in the United States; but lacking as they do the required cultural or language skills, their chances of finding terrorists, if any, before Dec. 31, 1999, are small indeed.