Clinton Tells of Techno-Terror Peril

President Clinton warned Wednesday of an angry sea of new dangers facing the United States in the 21st century, from evolving cyber-terrorism to miniature weapons of mass destruction, and announced a plan to add $300 million to the nation’s counter-terrorism campaign.

Offering the prospect of “a fateful struggle” between global harmony and chaos, the president said that the technological advances that made possible the Internet and the Human Genome Project also make “the tools of destruction deadlier, cheaper and more available, making us more vulnerable to problems that arise half a world away.”

On a sunny day of brisk, seaborne breezes bearing not a hint of such malice, Clinton presented a dark picture of malevolence lurking in the new technology as he addressed the 190 cadets graduated in the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s first class of the dawning century--one-third of them women.

Clinton cited the nation’s experience at the arrival of the new millennium, when, with the aid of Jordan, “we shut down a plot to place large bombs at locations where Americans might gather on New Year’s Eve.”

“We learned this plot was linked to terrorist camps in Afghanistan and the organization created by Osama bin Laden,” the president said, reiterating assertions by senior officials linking the threat to the man the United States holds responsible for the fatal blasts at U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.

Coast Guard Symbols

“A short time later, a customs agent in Seattle discovered bomb materials being smuggled into the U.S., the same materials used by Bin Laden in other places,” the president added.

Behind Clinton as he spoke rode symbols of the Coast Guard’s historic mission and its future: a 40-year-old cutter and a new state-of-the-art patrol boat, both white with the traditional red stripe across the bow, tied at a pier on the Thames River, New London’s outlet to the Long Island Sound, the Atlantic Ocean and the world.

It is a world, Clinton warned, offering new threats to the nation:

Computers, on which the world places ever greater reliance, are subject to viruses that can halt global commerce, such as the “love bug” that ran rampant through computers two weeks ago.

Biological, chemical “and maybe even nuclear weapons” can, in the hands of terrorists, bring chaos to the world, he said.

Health threats such as AIDS and malaria “can ruin economies and threaten the very survival of nations and societies,” Clinton said.

Global warming and narco-terrorism loom.

He warned too of the risk posed by nations and organizations seeking the expertise of nuclear weapon scientists in Russia, whose average salary is less than $100 a month.

The new reality, the president said, is that globalization and information technology “have magnified both the creative and the destructive potential of every individual, tribe and nation on our planet.”

But the solution, he said, is neither a “survivalist foreign policy” that turns the oceans into protective moats around the United States nor a “go-it-alone foreign policy,” but rather international cooperation and preparation.

Without the cooperation of Jordan and Canada in breaking up the threat from Bin Laden, he said, “we’d have had bombs going off here as we celebrated the millennium.”

Clinton’s immediate answer is the $300-million additional budget request, on top of the $9 billion he is seeking from Congress for counter-terrorism programs in the 2001 fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

Joint Terrorism Task Forces

The White House said that the money would be devoted to increasing joint terrorism task forces throughout the country that link the resources of the FBI; Immigration and Naturalization Service; the Customs Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Secret Service; and state and local law enforcement agencies.

The money would also be used to beef up monitoring across the often lightly guarded U.S.-Canadian border, expand federal crime lab examination of potentially fraudulent travel documents to help secure the border, help track terrorist financing and increase the number of Justice Department lawyers assigned to prosecute terrorists.