Asia Times Online


	September 13, 2001	atimes.com

Front

US girds for war with an unidentified enemy

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - One day after the most lethal attack on US territory, a stunned superpower told its people to prepare for war against an as-yet unidentified foreign enemy.

Top officials added that they had secured backing from NATO partners under the North Atlantic Treaty's collective security provisions. The 19-member alliance invoked Article 5 of the charter Wednesday for the first time in its history, declaring that the terror attacks against the United States could be treated as an assault against all NATO members - if it turns out they were directed from abroad.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said invoking the principle did not automatically mean that NATO force would be used against the targets of US military retaliation for Tuesday's hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. Rather, NATO allies could provide support such as overflight rights.

Washington's diplomatic moves and rhetorical declarations over the past 24 hours appear designed in part to prepare the ground for military action against targets in Afghanistan and perhaps elsewhere. The consultations with NATO partners and intense exchanges with Pakistan's government, which had played a decisive role in the Taliban's coming to power in Kabul, were especially suggestive.

With at least several thousand fatalities expected from Tuesday's terror attacks, President George W Bush vowed to strike against the perpetrators of what he called "acts of war". "The United States will use all our resources to conquer this enemy," he told the nation in his fourth televised appearance since the attacks. "This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil. But good will prevail."

Similar words of determination were heard all around Washington Wednesday. The leaders of both major parties declared they would stand " shoulder-to-shoulder" with the president in retaliating to the attacks, which constantly are compared with the 1941 Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II.

"The president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States has to reassure us, the American people, that this attack in the nation's capital is the equivalent of Pearl Harbor," urged Rob Simmons, a Republican member of the House of Representatives and former intelligence officer. "It is an act of war, and we will respond in kind."

Democratic and Republican lawmakers - who only two days ago were embroiled in an angry debate over the implications for social security programs of major increases in the defense budget - pledged to act quickly on any new requests for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Tuesday's attack "makes the social security lockbox seem trivial", said Democratic Representative Norm Dicks, who added that the public would now understand the necessity for dipping into social security funds to increase military and related spending.

Other lawmakers said they stood prepared to pass a law that would modify a 1976 executive order banning political assassinations by US agencies, to give them license to kill suspected terrorists. "When you're dealing with terrorists, the only real defense you have is the ability to interdict [them] before [they] act," said Bob Graham, Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Meanwhile, US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies were hard at work gathering evidence to determine who precisely was behind the attacks. Evidence collected at or near Logan Airport in Boston, where the two flights that ploughed into the Trade Center towers originated, suggested that individuals with Arabic names were involved. Several alleged suspects had been taken into custody, officials said. Police reportedly raided a hotel in Boston, a flight-training school in the state of Florida, and a passenger train they had ordered stopped in the state of Rhode Island.

At the same time, retired government specialists and independent terrorism analysts said the evidence to date points strongly to an Islamist hand behind the attacks, particularly that of Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, which consists of a number of clandestine Islamist groups.

"There are a number of powerful indicators to suggest that this was the work of bin Laden and his network - the audacity of the attack, the coordination, the choice of two pre-eminent symbols of American power, and the fact that the Trade Center was attacked eight years ago by people who had close ties to the bin Laden network," said Daniel Benjamin, a security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Other experts were less certain about bin Laden's sole authorship. A senior Clinton national security official suggested that the attacks' size, sophistication, and coordination probably required the cooperation of a number of Islamist groups close to Al Qaeda's network. Al Qaeda itself, they said, has never before hijacked aircraft.

Washington has blamed bin Laden, a veteran of the US-backed war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, for the 1998 bombings of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as last year's suicide bombing of the USS Cole, a navy destroyer, in Yemen.

After the embassy bombings, the administration of then president Bill Clinton launched cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan, which has sheltered bin Laden despite US efforts to extradite him, and Sudan, where bin Laden lived in the mid-1990s.

Bin Laden told associates several weeks ago that a major attack against the United States was imminent, according to a London-based Arabic newspaper. He has disavowed involvement in the New York and Washington attacks, according to published reports. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan denounced Tuesday's attacks and insisted that the multi-millionaire Saudi lacked the resources and reach to carry out such a sophisticated operation.

"The American people ... want us to act as if we are at war," Powell said early Wednesday. "And we are going to do that - diplomatically, militarily, picking options that will respond to this, searching out those who are responsible and those who harbor them."

(Inter Press Service)