Random Thoughts

Sept. 4, 2002

“Outside in the distance, a wild cat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl.“

-- All Along the Watchtower, Bob Dylan

One of the hazards of the War on Terrorism is that like a conspiracy theory, it‘s so murky and open-ended that any paranoid fantasy can grow in its muck.
Recently, a so-called intelligence report from DEBKA-Net in Israel claimed that between 75-125 terrorists entered the United States early this summer in cargo containers packed on ships. Supposedly, the terrorists pack all of the food and water they‘ll need for weeks at sea (“falafel anyone?“) along with bedding, guns, ammo and a porta-potty. Once on our shores, they cut their way free and scatter to plan mayhem in the heartland.
“U.S. Coast Guard, Special Forces and CIA and FBI counter-terror units routinely conduct massive manhunts to fend off the multi-tentacled al Qaeda invasion,“ claims DEBKA-Net. “Some sources report firefights between hunters and terrorists trapped in sea containers, in which between 15 and 25 terrorists may have died. In Miami and Savanna, containers with secret human burdens were unloaded from incoming vessels. Anti-terror squads shifted the boxes to a quiet corner of the harbor, drilled holes in their sides and filled them with gas and smoke bombs. The stowaways suffocated to death.“
But here‘s the big surprise: “For all their efforts, the U.S. hunters have not apprehended a single live al Qaeda terrorist landing by sea.“
Now you‘d think that if the combined military might of the United States had a small band of sea-sick, filthy terrorists locked up tight in a steel box with a brimming porta-potty on board a ship, we‘d be able to fetch at least one of them for questioning, rather than shooting the whole lot willy-nilly.
And the idea that the U.S. government is keeping hush-hush about the sea container menace in order not to alarm the American public strains all belief. These guys or their carcasses would be trotted out on CNN faster than you can say Donald Rumsfeld.
The story shows all the signs of a conspiracy theory: no evidence can be found because it has been “covered up“ by paternalistic feds. It has the ring of an urban legend or of propaganda cooked up in Israel‘s ministry of disinformation, say in the basement of Mossad headquarters.
And yet we know for a near certainty that terrorists are working in America; some estimates are that there are several hundred al Qaeda members in the U.S. with a similar number of helpmates. Nor are container ships needed to transport terrorists, considering our permeable borders with Canada and Mexico. In 1864, 12 Confederate guerrillas crossed the Canadian border into Vermont on foot. They robbed three banks of $210,000 and threw the state into a panic before escaping back across the border.
Last week‘s arrest of four Middle Eastern men in an alleged terrorist cell in Detroit seemed to confirm the fact that there are “sleeper cells“ lying dormant in our country, waiting to rise up and hit us. With apparent plans to attack Disneyland, the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and other targets, the arrest of the suspects reminds us that we need to be watchful.
History tells us that terrorists strike again and again. Any guidebook of London or Paris will reveal sites where terrorists from the IRA or Algeria set off bombs repeatedly over the course of 30 years at sites such as the entrance to Harrod‘s department store.
Mao Zedong, who established communist rule in China through guerrilla warfare, knew the value of using a few men to send shock waves through a nation. “The strategy is to pit one man against ten, but the tactic is to pit ten men against one,“ Mao said.
Next week, a lot of folks plan to keep their TVs off and their heads clear for the first anniversary of 9/11. That‘s understandable -- no one involved in a painful car accident cares to relive or dwell on the experience, and memories of the disaster at the Twin Towers are already so etched in our thoughts that we scarcely need a replay of the film footage to remind us of their collapse.
But appeals to the press and the networks to cool it on their 9/11 coverage can also lead to a head-in-the-sand complacency. What‘s really odd, given the history of terrorism, is that al Qaeda hasn‘t struck again. We need to keep watch because the question of more attacks still isn’t if, but when.