Policy Impact Panel
Combating Terrorism: What Works? What Doesn't?

Council on Foreign Relations

October 11, 1996

DATE October 11, 1996
PROGRAM Council on Foreign Relations Policy Impact Panel

Dr. LESLIE GELB (President, Council on Foreign Relations): Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Leslie Gelb. I'm president of the Council on Foreign Relations. And welcome, as well, to our audience from C-SPAN.

A specter looms over the world. It's not the specter of armies crossing borders, invading other nations. It's not even the specter of nuclear war. It is the looming horror of terrorism. Call it what you will, call them what you will--assassins, national liberators, terrorists. It's a problem that has now come to the forefront of foreign policy.

The Council on Foreign Relations has established a mechanism that we call policy impact panels to deal with major foreign policy issues such as this one. This is our sixth policy impact panel at the Council on Foreign Relations. The idea of the panel is very simple. We want to do two things. First, to try to establish, insofar as we can, the facts of the situation. In this case, just how serious is the problem of terrorism? Secondly, we want to look at the policy options. What can we really do to cope with that problem? The bluster of ideology and politics aside.

The people who put together the policy impact panels for the Council on Foreign Relations are Karen Sughrue, our vice president, and her assistants, Erika Burk and Irina Faskianos. And I thank them very much for their good and continuing efforts.

Our panel on terrorism today is very distinguished and led by a very distinguished former congressman from Oklahoma, Dave McCurdy, who has been, for many years, a genuine expert in national security affairs. He is now the chairman of his own business consulting group, the McCurdy Group, and I turn the proceedings over to him. Thank you very much.

Mr. DAVE McCURDY (Panel Chair; former United States Representative (D-Oklahoma), and Chairman, McCurdy Group LLC): Thank you, Les.

I'd like to open this session by introducing my fellow panel members, who are both accomplished leaders in their fields. Nadine Strossen is president of the American Civil Liberties Union and professor at New York Law School. And Ken Adelman is former director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Reagan administration and currently vice president of the Institute for Contemporary Studies.

We're here today to talk about the issue of terrorism. While international terrorism continues a downward trend, attacks on US interests, both at home and abroad, have jumped over the past two years. Incidents like the terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia, at the World Trade Center in New York City and in Oklahoma City and at the Olympics have made many Americans more wary than ever. One thing is sure: Terrorism is no longer something that happens in other countries and to other people; terrorism has come to America from overseas and from within our own borders.

To discuss the changing nature of terrorism and the adequacy of our policies to fight it, we have assembled a distinguished group of speakers. They are Jerry Bremer, former ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism and currently a managing director of Kissinger Associates; Brian Jenkins, deputy chairman of Kroll Associates; Wolfgang Reinicke, member of the senior research staff at The Brookings Institution; and Shibley Telhami, associate professor of the department of government and director of Near Eastern studies at Cornell University. And in the second session, Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the US Department of Justice.

Before we begin, my fellow panelist, Ms. Strossen, would like to make a short opening statement.

Professor NADINE STROSSEN (President, American Civil Liberties Union): Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm very happy to participate in this important forum. As president of the American Civil Liberties Union, my central concern here is that whatever steps we take to combat terrorism do not compromise our fundamental rights. Obviously, our liberty, as well as our lives, can be jeopardized directly by terrorist threats, and we should take reasonable, constructive steps to forestall any such threats. But it is important to remember that our lives and our liberty can also be jeopardized indirectly by terrorist threats to the extent that we respond to such threats by giving our own government agents powers to invade or even destroy our privacy, our freedom and our physical security and integrity. If we overreact to panic to terrorist threats by sacrificing the freedoms that make our country unique, the terrorists will have succeeded in their ultimate aim to destroy our country.

Unfortunately, too many politicians have responded to the very real threats, and the deserved outrage and anger over the incidents that Chairman McCurdy described by resorting to scapegoating of civil liberties, a supposed quick fix that has been used throughout our history recurrently that is doubly flawed. It is as ineffective a response to terrorist danger as it is unprincipled in terms of sacrificing our liberty. This is a danger that was underscored recently by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. She said, `It cannot be too often stated that the greatest threats to our constitutional freedoms come in times of crisis.'

So as we hear from our distinguished witnesses today, my overriding concern will be to avoid measures that do not make us more safe, but only less free.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you, Ms. Strossen. Ken, you may...

Mr. KENNETH L. ADELMAN (former Director, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Vice President, Institute for Contemporary Studies): Let me just say that I am honored to be here. It is far more enjoyable, Mr. Chairman, to be up here next to the angels than down there, where I spent many years in looking at people like you way up there.

Mr. McCURDY: Still enjoy being up here.

Mr. ADELMAN: And given the choice, I'd much rather be at your side than across the table and lower than you.

Let me say that while I very much think this is a very important subject, I think--I come to this thinking to myself that there may not be the kind of enormous problems that we have been thinking about on the heels of the Oklahoma and the Atlanta bombings. And why do I say that? For three reasons: Number one is, I think that without the system of a support system that the Soviet Union had funded all those years, with the Czechs involved, the Germans involved and others involved, that it's going to be a lot tougher to have any kind of organized or effective terrorist campaign against the West.

Number two is, I think that there is a rationality element in there: that the terrorists have found that it just doesn't pay; it doesn't advance any of their political goals to pursue terrorism. Quite the contrary, it diminishes support for that. I'm not talking about nihilism or crazy people. That will always come about. But I'm saying organized terrorism for political goal, I don't see as effective, and I think that the lesson, after a while, gets learned.

And number three is, I think that the technology is favoring those who are doing more the enforcement than those of the terrorism. In other words, the flow of technology is moving in our direction. I come to this hearing with those three views, but as Ross Perot says, I'm all ears. And I'm anxious to hear, especially our experts, and yourself and my fellow panel members, who know a lot more about the subject, I have to admit, than I do.

Mr. McCURDY: Well, thank you, Ken. And I'm not sure we're here to fix it, as Ross Perot would say, but we are here to learn more about the problems and the threat facing US interests and our allies abroad. And we're here to discuss the scope of the problem, what policy options are available and responses. And then, obviously, we're concerned about coordination with our allies.

Our first speaker--and, gentlemen, having been through this a few times before, we've asked you to keep your remarks to about seven minutes--and I'll try to enforce that--in order that we can complete the statements and have questions from the panel and from each other, actually.

With that, our first witness is Brian Jenkins, deputy chairman of Kroll Associates. Mr. Jenkins, thank you for being here.

Mr. BRIAN JENKINS (Deputy Chairman, Kroll Associates): Thank you very much.

One of the principle difficulties in formulating policy to combat terrorism is how to assess the threat. It makes a difference. And will terrorism in the future closely resemble terrorism in the past? Or will terrorists escalate their violence? Will terrorists employ weapons of mass destruction? Will terrorists go nuclear? My remarks this morning will try to briefly describe some of today's terrorist threats, to point out some of the trends in terrorism and how these may affect terrorism tomorrow.

It is important that we begin with an accurate image of the adversary. Although we may view terrorists as maniacal fanatics, their actions generally are calculated to achieve political goals: the reordering of society, independence, overthrow of despised regimes, the furtherance of national policy. And this does suggest some degree of rationality. However, the motives that drive terrorism are changing. Ideology is less important today as an engine of terrorism, although Marxist-inspired guerrillas still fight on in several countries. Ethnic divisions remain both a traditional cause and a source of new armed conflicts in the world. Religious fanaticism, a powerful motive for violence throughout history, once again seems on the rise and, indeed, there is concern that religious-inspired extreme behavior may increase as we approach the millennium.

These changes in motives affect the quality of terrorist actions. Religious fanaticism and racial hatred are motives that easily lend themselves to atrocities. Organizationally, terrorism has become more fluid. There are fewer identifiable terrorist organizations, more examples of actions by ad hoc conspiracies that form within galaxies of like-minded extremists. And this, obviously, increases the problem for intelligence. A handful of states continue to sponsor terrorist activity as a means of dealing with domestic foes abroad or furthering foreign policy objectives. But because of sanctions and the threat of military retaliation, they have become more circumspect. It is harder to prove connections now.

Tactically, the terrorists tend to be imitators rather than innovators. The terrorist repertoire has evolved very slowly over the last quarter-century. The need to always achieve success and to maintain, at least, some consensus among terrorists causes them to be conservative in their decision-making.

Up to now, most terrorist violence has been symbolic, not murderous. Simply killing a lot of people is seldom a terrorist objective. The fact is that terrorists have always had the capacity to kill in larger numbers if mayhem were their objective. The fact that they have not done so is not a result of technological limitations, but rather a matter of self-imposed constraints. Wanton killing is seen as counterproductive.

Now, obviously, not all of these constraints apply equal to all groups, and the constraints are not immutable. Long-term struggles tend to encourage escalation. Ethnic hatreds allow wholesale massacres. And when terrorists believe they have the mandate of God, conventional constraints may not apply at all. There is some evidence that the constraints are eroding. Terrorism has become more lethal. The percentage of incidents with fatalities is gradually increasing and, indeed, seven of the 10 bloodiest terrorist incidents have all occurred within the last decade. Large-scale indiscriminate violence is today's terrorist reality. Now this may take the form of truck bombs, massive quantities of explosives on wheels or more sophisticated, small explosive devices designed to elude security systems and bring down airliners or attacks on public transport systems--all actions calculated to kill in quantity.

Still, in its present form, terrorism does not yet pose a major threat to human life. Terrorism represents only a fraction of the total death toll from ordinary crime, and it is miniscule compared to the casualties of conventional war. However--and I think this is an important issue of policy--body count is not the soul criterion nor necessarily the most important criterion for measuring terrorism. Terrorism creates alarm, causes national crises. It erodes confidence in institutions and then challenges social order.

Now how much can we expect to see terrorists escalate? The thing I want to point out here is, it is possible that we will see escalation, but there are limits. First of all, it's simply hard to kill a lot of people. Of over 10,000 terrorist incidents in the last quarter-century, fewer than a dozen involved 100 or more fatalities. The fact that bombings comprised the majority of all terrorist attacks tells us something. Bombings are easy to do, especially when the bombers don't have to penetrate security. It's easy to escape. And no matter where the bomb goes off, it is a success if the bomb goes off. Fear of capture or death remain powerful deterrents, even to political and religious fanatics. Indeed, in the entire history of terrorism, suicidal attacks, although they cause great concern, are rare and they are limited to specific cultures or religious belief systems.

Terrorists could escalate merely by increasing the volume of large-scale attacks, but that's not easy, either. We have seen isolated terrorist spectaculars, like the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings. Historically, attempts to coordinate simultaneous attacks are met with only limited success. Terrorist offensives or surges of activity have quickly declined to sporadic low-level attacks. A sustained campaign of significant acts of terrorism requires organization, resources, logistics, above all, an ability to maintain secrecy. And that's extremely difficult, especially as the carnage mounts and the group comes under increasing external pressure from authorities--authorities who may be operating under different rules--and as internal pressure mounts from those inside the organization with growing doubts. To survive, the group would had to have had time to prepare for lengthy clandestine operations without attracting attention to its preparations and to maintain absolute obedience among its followers. This, again, has implications for intelligence.

It is problematical whether we can prevent the isolated attacks. In some cases, yes; in some cases, no. With effort, we probably can identify and prevent or at least interrupt campaigns of significant terrorist actions.

Will terrorists enter the realm of weapons of mass destruction? There is no inexorable progression from truck bombs into chemical weapons, biological weapons or nuclear weapons although, clearly, the Aum Shinrikyo sect's use of nerve gas in Tokyo might inspire further incidents of that type. Prior to the Tokyo incidence, we did have a rich history of the use of chemical substances, but these were involved in criminal extortion schemes or as a mode of economic warfare, not mass murder or in the unrealized plans of madmen. The few actual attempts that caused mass murder or, at least, mass use of chemical or biological substances were associated with religious cults.

The fact is, here again, it's hard to do. Aum Shinrikyo was a large, well-financed, scientifically staffed organization. It managed to produce a limited amount of an impure form of nerve gas and an even cruder method of dispersal. It is clear from the examination of that attack that escape was important to the members of the organization. And as a result of that attack, the group was destroyed, a lesson, hopefully, that will be realized by other groups. And as a result of the Tokyo attack, the authorities are now watching for this type of event more closely, or at least they should be.

As for the future, I believe that threats are more likely than actual use of chemical or biological weapons. Small-scale attacks are more likely than large-scale attacks. Crude dispersal devices in an enclosed environment are perhaps the most likely mode of attack, with casualties potentially running in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands mentioned in some of the more lurid novels.

Now fear that the collapse of the Soviet Union will result in the emergence of a nuclear black market has raised concerns about the possibility of nuclear terrorism. Indeed, there have been a number of incidents in which suppliers have demonstrated that they have access to small quantities. There have been no completed sales yet in this nascent black market insofar as we know, but we can't be sure that all is known. Organized crime, which has acted in the former Soviet Union, does not appear to have entered the business yet and it's not clear if they will enter the trade in the future. Obviously, the emergence of a black market--nuclear black market would raise the danger.

In sum, looking ahead to the future, terrorism tomorrow will be different. It will be bloodier. The--more large-scale attacks are likely. But terrorists' entry into the domain of weapons of mass destruction, while it remains a possibility, is neither inevitable nor necessarily probable.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you, Mr. Jenkins, for setting the stage and providing a good background for our discussions.

Prof. STROSSEN: May I ask one follow-up question for clarification?

Mr. McCURDY: For clarification?

Prof. STROSSEN: Yes. I just want to be sure, Mr. Jenkins, all the way through, you didn't distinguish between incidents in the United States and in other parts of the world. So is the pattern that you describe both presently and in the future applicable here as well as in other parts of the world to the same extent?

Mr. JENKINS: In my remarks, I was referring to worldwide trends, and I think clearly, the World Trade Center bombing and Oklahoma City bombing would indicate that the United States is not going to be immune to these worldwide trends.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you.

Our next witness on the panel today is Jerry Bremer, former ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism and managing director of the Kissinger Associates. Ambassador.

Ambassador L. PAUL BREMER III (former Ambassador-at-Large for Counter-terrorism and Managing Director, Kissinger Associates): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Twice in the last 30 years, terrorism has presented the West with what I would call a conceptual challenge. The first time was when terrorism, in a modern sense, burst on the world in the late '60s. The West had a very hard time figuring out how to deal with it, largely because we didn't understand what we were dealing with. And for most of the 1970s, the governments of the West, including the United States, were running around trying to find a policy which they couldn't find because we were unclear as to what terrorism was.

I would argue that it took most of the decade of the '70s to get that straight, and it wasn't until the 1980s that the West finally arrived at a coherent counterterrorist policy. And I think we now may be at a second crossroads in the fight against terrorism. In a way, I see, as to some degree Mr. Jenkins does, two-step changes in the kind of terrorism we're facing. One of them is a move towards more religious-oriented terrorism. And the second is a possible shift, as Mr. Jenkins has talked about, from conventional to mass destruction terrorism.

I want to talk about both of those briefly, but, obviously, we still continue to face what I would call the old kinds of terrorism, particularly the old-fashioned radical Palestinian terrorist groups based largely in Syria. These are the familiar secular-oriented Marxist groups that we've been familiar with for the last 20 years. We will continue to face ethnic-based terrorism, and we've seen a lot of that, particularly in Europe in the IRA, the vast terrorist ETA and the PKK in Turkey. And finally, we continue to have state support for terrorism. While Mr. Adelman is correct that the fall of the Soviet Union certainly removes an important international structure for terrorism, it nonetheless is the case that states do continue to support terrorism. Indeed, except for the ethnic groups, every one of the most dangerous terrorist groups today has some kind of a state sponsor or state sponsorship.

Now the two new terrorist threats that I spoke of--religious terrorism and mass casualty terrorism--present us with a new conceptual challenge. And it seems to me the question is: Are we going to take a decade to try to sort out this new conceptual challenge as we did the first time? Religious terrorism Mr. Jenkins has spoken to, but I would make this contrast. In the 1970s and 1980s, most of the terror we were familiar with was primarily political in orientation and pragmatic. The Middle East terrorist groups wanted to destroy Israel or break America's connection with Israel, and they had a very pragmatic, in a sense, political goal.

Similarly, the left-wing groups, Marxist groups in Europe--that were active in Europe with some support from the Soviet Union wanted to break America's ties with NATO and get us out of Europe or break NATO--very pragmatic and political goals. And in the design of their attacks, they wanted to, in effect, draw attention to themselves, get support for their cause and try to--try to get public appreciation for what they were doing. I would argue that this acted as an important constraint on the kind of terrorism they were willing to carry out, because, obviously, if they went too far, they were going to lose public support; and, indeed, that's what happened. It was precisely because they went too far in the end of the 1970s that the West did come around with a counterterrorist policy in the '80s.

I would argue that these constraints don't apply as much to the new religious and millenarian kinds of groups. These groups don't seek public support from the West. Indeed, their objective is revenge or expressing hatred for us. And to some of these terrorists, in particular the West and the United States represents `the great Satan.' Whereas the secular terrorists that we faced in the '70s and '80s hated America because of whom we supported, these new groups hate the United States for what it is. They don't seek a shift in our policies, but the destruction of our society, and I would argue that's an important change.

This presents a new conceptual challenge, I think, because most Americans don't like to believe that people hate us. They like to think that there's simply a misunderstanding. In fact, many of these terrorist groups hate us precisely because they understand us. Most of the terrorists who took over at the American Embassy in Teheran were educated in the United States. Almost all of the people who were arrested in the World Trade Center bombing were living in the United States. And there is increasing evidence that terrorist groups are active collecting funds in the United States for use in terrorist attacks abroad.

The second conceptual challenge we face, which, again, Mr. Jenkins has touched on, is the possibility of NBC terrorism--nuclear, biological and chemical terrorism; terrorism with vast casualties. In the 1970s and '80s, I think those of us who worked on counterterrorism believed that there were four kinds of constraints that kept terrorists from moving up the ladder to mass casualty. There were, first of all, conceptual constraints. The argument was, it was difficult to find a symmetry between a threat you could make of a radiological or chemical or biological weapon and the demand you were asking. If you hijack a plane and ask for seven prisoners to be released, there's a certain symmetry in the demands, and a government can deal with it. But what exactly is it you ask for to say, `I'm going to set off a radiological device in downtown Paris?' What is--how do you make a symmetrical demand?

Secondly, it was assumed that there were political constraints against the use of mass destruction. I've touched on it already. If you are in a terrorist group which is trying to get public attention and support, then you are, in a way, politically constrained from moving up the ladder to superterrorism.

Thirdly, we believe there were technical constraints. These kinds of weapons are very dangerous to handle for the terrorists, too. And we believed that it--they would, therefore, be constrained from trying to move into this area.

And finally, it was argued by counterterrorist experts in the '70s and '80s that there were psychological constraints. No terrorist group, so it was believed, would want to be the first group to use these kinds of weapons.

Now I would argue that all four of these constraints have, unfortunately, eroded. First of all, the political and conceptual constraints, as I've already indicated, are based on two assumptions: that terrorist groups wanted something in return for not carrying out an act--that is to say, there was something that they wanted in return; and secondly, that they wanted public understanding or support for their cause. Obviously, with the shift from the political pragmatic to the ideological religious terror means a shift in their objectives.

Other groups, like the Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, are sort of millenarinists who, in fact, could argue--whose leaders could argue, as the leader of Aum Shinrikyo did argue, that the kind of mass destruction, in fact, helps their hold over their followers. So I think both the political and conceptual constraints have faded. The technical constraints are fading in the sense that, much more now than before, anybody can get access to information about how to produce chemical, biological weapons. It's available on the Internet. You can look up and find the--an accurate formula for anthrax on the Internet. And, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union does raise legitimate concerns about the possibility of radiological devices falling into hands. Finally, the psychological barrier has, obviously, been broken, not only by the use of nerve gas by the Aum Shinrikyo, but by the prolific use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis and the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war in the '80s and the pusillanimous reaction of the foreign international community to that first use of a chemical weapon.

Let me then say, also, where this comes together is with--where the problem of NBC comes together is in looking at the issue of state terrorism. I think, Mr. Chairman, that the Gulf War presented a very clear lesson to potential regional pariah states or aggressive states, and that is that even a lavishly equipped conventional army is no match for the American Army. And one lesson, therefore, is to tempt people like Saddam Hussein to move up the ladder themselves to lift their biological or chemical capabilities. We know now that Saddam Hussein did have chemical capabilities deployed on the front line. And we know that many of the states which are involved in sponsoring terrorism--Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq--all have programs in precisely nuclear, biological and chemical warfare. And many of them are developing ballistic missile capability for the delivery of these weapons.

Now this is slightly off the terrorism point, but once states which sponsor terrorism acquire these kinds of capabilities, there is a severe danger, I think, in the coming decade of leakage of this kind of technology to the kinds of terrorist groups that those people support.

My conclusion is that terrorism will continue to be a problem, and the question about the success or failure of meeting its--the challenge will be three questions: Do policymakers have a clear concept of the threat and the strategy to deal with it? Secondly, are they dedicating sufficient time, energy and resources to gathering reliable, usable intelligence on terrorist threats? And finally, most important, do our leaders have the will to act vigorously and consistently against terrorists?

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you, Ambassador.

Our next witness is Dr. Telhami, who's the associate professor of the department of government and director of Near Eastern studies at Cornell University. Dr. Telhami.

Dr. SHIBLEY TELHAMI (Associate Professor, Department of Government, and Director of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University): Thank you very much.

I will limit my remarks to Middle Eastern terrorism, which is of interest to a lot of people. And by way of introduction, let me just make a couple of points. One is that the Middle East is not the leading region in world--in the world in terms of the frequency of terrorism, nor of anti-US terrorism. In 1995, for example, Latin America was the leading region for anti-US terrorism with 62 incidents; Europe with 21; Europe and Asia--I'm sorry--Middle East and Asia were tied with six. So, clearly, it's not the place where most of the terrorist activity takes place. Also, most terrorism in the Middle East is neither state sponsored, nor does it target Israel or the US. An example: The places where most terrorism takes place are Algeria and Turkey. And both of them face mostly domestic terrorism, not one motivated by either international sponsors or international objectives.

Keeping these--this introduction in mind, let me just make four general points on fighting Middle Eastern terrorism. Number one, to be effective in garnering regional support in the fight on terrorism, we must not let our general foreign policy objectives intrude into the way we frame the fight, lest we lose credibility. This is too important a fight, I think, to be taken lightly. Let me give you two examples. One, in terms of holding the right people responsible when terrorism takes place. An example of this is that act on US forces in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Certainly, if we have evidence linking a state to that violence, that is serious business, and that state ought to be punished and it ought to be punished even if only punitively. This is too serious an attack on US forces to be taken lightly. That is why we can't take it too lightly. That is why we can't, certainly, accuse people without having evidence and then not even follow through, because that's when we lose credibility in the region.

The second example is about how we define terrorism. It is important that we keep our concepts clear and against--free of intruding political objectives. The suicide attacks against Israelis in the streets of Tel Aviv--that is terrorism, plain and simple, ugly and murderous. The attacks by Hezbollah groups in southern Lebanon on Lebanese ground against Israeli soldiers, while undesirable, we cannot call it terrorism, or else we're not going to get anybody to support us in the region on this issue. You can say that it's undesirable. All violent means of resolving conflict should be opposed by the US. But we must make clear what is terrorism and what's not terrorism if you want people to come on board in this fight in the region.

The second broad point that I want to make is about state sponsors. Certainly, state sponsorship is a problem, and perhaps an increasing one, no doubt. But I think you must couple your policy of being tough, which is an essential ingredient, with a carrot. And let me give you an example here that is very interesting pertaining to Iran, which has been certainly addressed by American foreign policy. We have pursued a policy of getting very tough with Iran, in fact, escalating the sanctions on Iran over time, with the hope that they would stop supporting international terrorism. The US government position is that after the many years of tough policy, Iraq--Iran's sponsorship is actually increasing. Iran's sponsorship of terrorism is increasing rather than decreasing.

And, in fact, one can make a very strong argument that their incentive to carry out--to sponsor terrorism is increasing because, in the absence of engagement, they're under the impression that we may be out to get the government. They see all sorts of evidence in terms of congressional allocations for covert operations, our military presence. And, in fact, frankly, they have no resources to be able to meet the US conventionally. In fact, their military budget--conventional military budget has gone down at the very same time that our argument is that their budget on terrorism has increased. Terrorism is cheap. It is a cheap way of pursuing policy. And, therefore, I think we have to reconsider a policy of all stick with no carrot.

A third point that I would like to make is, yes, do not reward terrorism. Terrorists would not be rewarded. That is something that we certainly should start with. But the fight with terrorists is not as direct as is sometimes implied by this slogan. Terrorism by definition is political violence, and those sponsoring it aim at the sympathy and allegiance of a desperate population. And, clearly, while you can't reward directly the terrorists, there is an arena where you can fight them with positive steps.

Let me give you an example in the case of the Palestinian issue. There was a peace process that was working. In the winter of last year, there were elections. It looked like things were moving forward. There were suicide bombings that were very ugly against Israelis. The immediate response within the Palestinian community, the target of these attacks, was exactly the opposite of what the bombers expected. Because the peace process was working, in fact, there was sympathy even for the Israelis for the first time among Palestinians. Thousands of people demonstrated against the bombings. And the poll taken the day after the third bombing indicated that Hamas support within the Palestinian community dropped to 14 percent.

Within two weeks, after the closures of the territories, which were interpreted by the Palestinians to be a form of collective punishment, the polls indicated that the support for Hamas increased to 30 percent. The arena, of course, is--arena for that population allegiance, not just the fight--the technical fight vs. terrorism--yes, we do need toughness; yes, we do need technical measures. But we can't lose sight of that arena which is the aim of the terrorists; otherwise, we wouldn't call it terrorism, because by definition, terrorism is defined as violence for political objectives.

The fourth point that I'd like to make is that, yes, terrorism in the Middle East will likely continue, even if you have an Arab-Israeli peace, even if you succeed in resolving the problems. The truth of the matter is, I--as I suggested earlier, much of this violence is not related either to Israel or to the US or is it as a result of state sponsorship. Algeria, again, is a good example. But let's face it. What concerns US foreign policy most is not really terrorism in general in the region. Very few people have really paid attention to terrorism within Algeria. What concerns the US most is terrorism against the US and Israel.

For example, in 1995, in fact, we had a sharp decline in the frequency--the overall frequency of terrorism in the Middle East. But it was also the top--it was also the year when the terrorist threat was highlighted very much in the American arena and in US foreign policy and was made more of an issue. And the reason for it is obvious: the terrorist attack against US forces in Saudi Arabia and the suicide bombings in Israel. And those were of concern not only because of the bloodshed, but also because of the political consequences for American foreign policy.

And in that kind of arena--that is, attacks against the US and Israel--an Arab-Israel peace would certainly diminish the US and Israel as a target of terrorism if it does not address terrorism in general in the region. And that is why I think we should keep in mind that terrorism and fighting terrorism is one more reason that makes the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict a very important American objective, a very important American interest.

Let me end with a note about the environment where terrorism thrives. If you look in the region where terrorism tends to thrive, you find that it thrives either in a situation of anarchy, like we've seen during the Lebanese civil war, or in a situation of total repression, where people don't have any other way to address the political problems that they have. That suggests to me that you certainly need an enforcer; you do need a stick in the fight vs.--vis a vis terrorism. But it also suggests to me that the fight cannot work, because even in cases of total repression, you have an increase in the number of terrorist incidents; you do need a stick. And that is the point that I'd like to keep focused on. Thank you.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you, Dr. Telhami.

Our next witness for this panel is Dr. Wolfgang Reinicke, who's a member of the senior research staff at The Brookings Institution.

Dr. WOLFGANG REINICKE (Member, Senior Research Staff, The Brookings Institution): Thank you very much. I'd like to thank, first of all, the Council for hosting this meeting, and it's a privilege for me to testify to this distinguished panel.

Initially, of course, you might wonder why international terrorism has suddenly surged to the top of policymakers' agenda, because the trend, as the speakers have indicated during the last decade, do not necessarily warrant this. The number, in fact, has been declining. What has changed, however, is, first, that the more recent attacks and those that will happen in the future have the potential to be much more violent and deadly, and this has been talked about. And second--and this is the area around which I want to focus my remarks on--we have seen the end of the bipolar structure of the international system, which has drawn the attention of policymakers to other challenges, many of which are of a transnational nature, including international terrorism.

The nature of that threat arising from these transnational challenges, however, is fundamentally different, and we have to understand that if we want to develop an effective and efficient cost-saving policies. The basic threat to the United States and the Western alliance during the Cold War was territorial in nature. Our institutions, the infrastructure, the instruments and policies charged with providing security were a reflection of the principal fear that the Soviet Union would violate the territorial integrity of the Western alliance. Terrorism does not.

Terrorism does not threaten the territorial integrity of a country, nor does it represent necessarily another territoriality defined unit, such as a state. It is neither the goal of terrorists to invade countries, nor would they have the capacity to do so. Terrorists hit selectively at small targets, groups or even individuals. Terrorists' threats are diffused. They're difficult to target and fix. They are difficult to measure, and it's often difficult to associate them with a particular country. State-sponsored terrorism is by no means the most important form of terrorism.

The non-territorial nature of terrorism is amplified by the fact that it relies upon and feeds off other emerging structures in the international system that not only defy borders, but the success of which is predicated on cutting across borders. We are witnessing the evolution of a number of cross-national networks pertaining to technology transfer, the processing and dissemination of information, financial intermediation, transport and, last but not least, research and development that are the backbone of an emerging global production structure.

Terrorists are parasites that attach themselves to these legal networks, feed off them, cutting easily across into increasingly permeable borders. The declining importance of territory as both the source and destination of a threat have led to an information deficit on behalf of policymakers. Now for borders to take on the role of providing such information would have severe consequences for the continued spread of globalization with, of course, considerable economic costs. And, indeed, I would argue that this is no longer a realistic option.

Governments need to enhance their information by intercepting elsewhere--that is, on both sides of the border, or if you will, upstream and downstream--of an evolving terrorist threat. Downstream does require greater transparency and disclosure at home. And I'm aware of the potential consequences, both as far as access to proprietary information is concerned as well as the alleged implications for privacy of individual citizens. And clearly, there is no easy answer to this issue. In essence, we're talking about systemic risk management, and we have to ask ourselves: How much risk, as a society, are we willing to take? Our financial and other commitments during the Cold War indicated that we were unwilling to take any risk at all.

However, such an exercise in collective action will be difficult to repeat in the face of these non-territorial threats, precisely because they are diffused and, at least for now, do not threaten the collective security of the United States. The debates and divisions that have erupted over the transparency and disclosure issue in this country reflects that and remind us of yet another hidden strength that terrorism has. I think the only real hope that we can have in resolving this debate, or at least limiting the import of its outcome is to focus on combating terrorism at its source.

And let me frame this discussion by looking at a popular instrument that is sanctions. We can now see that they are not a very good match for the kind of threat that terrorism is. To be effective, sanctions much be directed at a particular territory and they must be tight. Terrorists, as I mentioned, are highly mobile and can and do evade that territory. Sanctions are a form of collective punishment. Terrorism is neither a threat that emanates from a collectivity called nation state nor, as I said, is it directed against a collectivity. Sanctions will never had unanimous and sustained support and often lead to inconsistencies in policy.

The term `rogue state' reflects that even our thinking and vocabulary is still very much attached to the Cold War concept of territory. States are not rogue; their leaders are and, in many cases, the dominant political elites. Sanctions do not hit them, but those in society that are not rogue and have no ambitions to be rogue must struggle with economic hardship and poverty. If anything, sanctions strengthen both the elites and any potential for popular support of those terrorists in those countries.

If the major challenge for policymakers is to reduce the information asymmetry, then isolating and excluding countries via sanctions or other instruments is counterproductive. The only way to reduce the information asymmetry is to include and integrate those countries into the international economy; its institutions, norms and networks. Inclusion will create political and economic conditions in these countries that make it difficult for terrorists to establish a support base. Inclusion will also generate multiple points of access for gathering the valuable information. And these points of access are not only located in the public sphere, but private sector access must share responsibility in reducing the information asymmetry as they have privileged access to timely and valuable information about those activities. Finally, information must be shared among governments to be effective. The recent dispute that has erupted between the United States and its closest allies over sanctions does not help such efforts at closer international cooperation. The European Union does not oppose the sanctions as one of the many instruments available to combat terrorism. When, if, and how, and what kind of sanctions are being used, has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. And in light of my earlier comments, it would seem prudent to explore other initiatives first that are directed at the economic integration of a particular country or region while promoting economic and political stability.

Dr. REINICKE: (Joined in progress) And here the European Union's Mediterranean initiative is an example of how one can go about that. But whatever the merits of sanctions, the EU cannot and, in my judgment, will not accept the unilateral inquisition of US law, as in the case of the Helms-Burton and D'Amato acts. It can and it will not because such unilateral projection of US national law violates the most basic principle of our international system, and that is the mutual respect of a country's sovereignty.

Now this, by no means, implies that a country cannot reduce its sovereignty in order to cooperate on such issues as terrorism, but we establish an extensive set of multilateral structures and mechanisms that can accommodate such a joint and reciprocal reductions and the cooperation that follows from that. If they are insufficient to serve this particular purpose, then we have to reform them and strengthen them. And I would urge the United States, in particular, and the European Union to immediately start such efforts. We risk to overload an already fragile international system with such disputes, something that we cannot afford, since terrorism and other transnational challenges will be the bread and butter of international relations in the 21st century. Thank you.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you very much, Dr. Reinicke.

Gentlemen, thank you for your remarks. Each of these statements have been superb and have laid a very good foundation for our discussion today. Let me attempt to just summarize the different remarks and to put them in categories, and then perhaps we can address our questions and keep a fairly tight focus here.

Mr. Jenkins, I think, gave us an excellent overview of the challenge and the problem that we face. It was clear from his comments that the collapse of the bipolar struggle, that idealism is less of a motivation today than perhaps in the past for terrorism. However, we do see an increase in religious fanaticism, which is a difficult challenge to address and, as well, racial and ethnic hatred as a motivation and as a root cause for these kinds of activities. Accordingly, it's less organized, because it's--potentially can be more--conducted by ad hoc groups in ad hoc bases. And there are fewer state sponsors. There are more imitators than innovators. But the nature of the acts could potentially increase because of recent events, such as the Aum Shinrikyo attack in Tokyo, as well as the World Trade Center and even Oklahoma City. Then you also discussed the symbolic nature vs. the degree to which mass murder might be an objective. All of these pose very difficult challenges for governments or policymakers trying to address those.

Ambassador Bremer spoke eloquently about the shift from a pragmatic, if we can use that term--pragmatic form of terrorism objectives, those who actually had realistic objectives or objectives that they tried to have some political or conceptual response, to the more religious and radical and, therefore, radical ideological nature. The Ambassador discussed the escalation in the level of violence and the increased threat, not perhaps from the numbers or in--of incidences, but the actual threat from the type of attack; talked a great deal about symmetry, obviously, technical restraints, which appear to be loosening, plus the increase in information available for those who seek different types of attack, plus the psychological impacts of terrorism as an objective.

Dr. Telhami, I think, made very good points about framing the fight and then put it in perspective that Middle Eastern terrorism, although very vivid and oftentimes very bloody, has captured perhaps world attention, but, in fact, there are many more incidents occurring in other parts of the world and may even threaten US interests there as much, such as Latin America and Eastern Europe; also, made a very good argument for trying to address the root causes as an ultimate solution but, again, framed it in a way that--the difficulty of policymakers in being able to frame an effective response to terrorism.

And Professor Reinicke talked about the information asymmetry, the fact that because of the breakdown of bipolar and the ability to collect or get information about terrorism in the groups is difficult; also by the changing nature of it, that the decline or the collapse of state barriers or borders and the rather non-territorial nature of it is much more difficult to address. And in order to be effective, you have to be able to get a consensus and more collective action, but it's difficult when groups are no longer supported by--are not often supported by states and that unilateral actions often are counterproductive if you don't get state support or allied support in these efforts.

That's a crude attempt to summarize those excellent statements. Let me then just talk quickly about, first of all, the scope of the problem. And I think it's clear we've defined it as the number of incidents actually decreasing, but the level of violence in those incidents have increased and the fact that it's a much more difficult problem to address today for policymakers.

It appears to me that one of the challenges, because of the changing nature of this, if you're trying to categorize in the area of prevention, first--you can talk about prevention and then perhaps reversal and then even response in the case of an incident. In the prevention phase, you're trying to deny, you're trying to demotivate, you're trying to deter and you're probably trying to defend. It's--one of those issues, I think, is the question of demotivate. How, in this changing nature of terrorism today, do we demotivate and have a better understanding of the motivation of those who are most likely to perpetrate acts of terrorism and violence against innocent civilians? I'll open it to the panel.

Dr. TELHAMI: Well, let me just take a crack at this in one specific case that I mentioned in my talk, which is the Palestinian case. It is interesting, I think, to keep that in mind, because, you know, in an effective fight on terrorism, you have to keep, as I said, always an eye on the political dimension of that fight. I think if you look, for example, on Arafat's crackdown on the militants after the suicide attacks on--in Israel in the spring of last year, which had been reasonably effective overall, in terms of since then, we haven't had--we haven't seen suicide attacks, despite deterioration in the political scene.

If you look at that particular response, I think a lot of people ask, `Why did he wait that long? Why didn't he do it before?' And I think there is a reason why he didn't do it before, besides his being maybe reluctant or ineffective, whatever you might want to use. But the fact is, before, he didn't have as much legitimacy for two reasons. A lot of people thought of him as not being particularly legitimate. And in the elections that were held in which he defeated the militants rather soundly, he clearly gained a lot of legitimacy. The political process itself gave him legitimacy. And the second was that you had a peace process that was moving. Israel did withdraw from cities, except for Hebron, and he had something to show for his constituents. And that enabled him to crack down on Hamas militants. It enabled him to use his new clout to be able to be effective and to have a response of--from the Palestinian community. Had he done that a year before, I'm not sure he would have been as effective. It isn't just a function of his policing ability; it is also his ability to garner popular support in that fight.

Mr. McCURDY: As heinous as those acts were, however, the example that you're giving still appears to have a rather pragmatic--I mean, there is a political objective in--involved here. When you're dealing with other types of recent events--the Aum Shinrikyo--in the United States, we often hear of the actual attacks, the incidents, but we don't often hear about the denials, the interventions. There have been a number of US citizens, for instance, that have been arrested carrying toxins, whether it's ricin or botulism or, you know, other types of you know, measures to initiate attacks. But this is a prevention measure. These have had--there's no common link between them. Some were members of militia. Some were--had religious views. Some had political. And that highlights the problem and the challenge that policiesmakers currently face. And that is, if there's not a clear ideological route here, how do you identify them and how do you demotivate them or deny them their ability to attack? Prof. STROSSEN: Especially when we get to the kind of phenomena that Ambassador Bremer was talking about: the terrorist attacks that are motivated by hatred of the United States precisely because they understand the values that this country stands for. I assume there isn't much we can do on way of demotivation other than hand them a victory beforehand.

Amb. BREMER: I think that's right. I think, basically, the fundamental fight against terrorism--80 percent of the fight is having a clear concept and good intelligence. If you've got a clear concept and you know what you're up against, then the question is: Are you devoting enough resources to intelligence, in effect, to disrupt, deny and deter attacks? I'm not very much attracted to the concept of demotivation against these kinds of terrorists, because I don't think it gets you very far.

Dr. TELHAMI: May I comment on this? Because I think that Ambassador Bremer and I have a slightly different view on this hate-motivated terrorism.

Now I can't speak for every region around the world, because the truth of the matter is, my expertise as a social scientist is mostly the Middle East. But on the Middle East, in terms of what has emerged, if you are--if one is calling the--a new terrorism in the Middle East as a new phenomenon that is motivated more by hate than political objectives, certainly, that's not the way I view it. I have, for example--I mean, I would just remind you when you look at the Islamic factor, which has been employed as the reason for this hate--I remind you that in the '50s and '60s, you know, the Islamic movements were actually the ones on the--sort of the side of the West, and it was the secularists who were conducting most of the militant acts in the Middle East. Theology isn't the issue here.

And I think in--in--at least in the--in the--in the arena where I've studied, for example, on the--on the Palestinian issue, where I've witnessed debates between militants who advocate militant options and those who advocate more peaceful, moderate options, and clearly, the debate was all political about objectives; it isn't about hate. That is the case. I've interviewed a lot of people from--from those groups. And what comes across, at least to my mind, is a different kind of vision, at least, in terms of what motivates that--that terrorism in the Middle East. I don't think it's hatred.

Mr. McCURDY: Ken, you want to quickly...

Mr. ADELMAN: Yes. Let me say that I thought the statements were excellent by the panel--really superb. And if we go back to Ambassador Bremer's point that these groups are more religious than pragmatic and understanding that we have to support the peace process, etc., etc., but I want to know what do we do about all this? And Ambassador Bremer tells us that 80 percent of it is good concepts and good intelligence. Now on the panel for the Council on Foreign Relations, I certainly applaud your good concepts. I mean, as a think tank and as a foreign policy study group, we're all for good concepts; we're all against bad concepts. But what good do these good concepts do, besides publishing books and having interesting panels? I mean, we've got to do something about it. And presuming that the terrorists don't read the Council on Foreign Relations' good concepts in publications, because not many of them probably do, so what? We have good concepts.

Now on good intelligence, everybody agrees and we don't have to spend a lot of time on it. It's an important issue, but it's not a very interesting issue, because you say better intelligence, but you need better intelligence of everything in life. So that's no answer to anything. You keep striving and everything like that.

My point is, if it is more religious, if they are going against our essence rather than our policies, then what do you do about it? And it seems to me that it--these are harder groups to break into now because of the religious aspects and that good concepts won't do a darn thing for you.

Amb. BREMER: Let me thank you for those complimentary remarks.

Mr. ADELMAN: I support your good concepts...

Amb. BREMER: Let--let me...

Mr. ADELMAN: ...clear concepts.

Amb. BREMER: Let me be clear that what I said about concepts was conceptual clarity, if you had listened carefully from my statement. That's what I was talking about. We need to be clear what we're facing. It isn't that we need to have some fancy airy-fairy think-tank concept. What we need to be is clear of what we're facing, and then we need good intelligence. And I disagree with you on the intelligence. I think this--in my experience of now almost 30 years in and out of government, this is the most difficult target there is. This is much more difficult than figuring out where Russia's--or, in those days, the Soviet Union's--SS25s were.

This is a target which is very hard to get at and where intelligence really is the heart of the fight. These new groups, precisely because they are not as organized as the other ones, as Mr. Jenkins pointed out, present us an even more difficult target than the kind of terrorist groups we went up against in the '70s and '80s. These are ad hoc groups. They're very difficult to penetrate. And, indeed, I think it is the heart of the matter, both in terms of domestic terrorist groups and in international groups. So I--I... Mr. ADELMAN: Fine. I--I have no...

Amb. BREMER: ...I think intelligence really is, in this case...

Mr. ADELMAN: I have no problem with that.

Amb. BREMER: ...in order of magnitude, more important than it is in most other foreign policy issues.

Mr. ADELMAN: I have no problem with that. I agree with it entirely. I told you it's very important. I'm just saying it's not very interesting because the fact is that you need better intelligence for everything. And because of the very good arguments you made on the nature of the groups changing, it is harder to get that good intelligence. So as a policymaker nowadays, you know, Ambassador Bremer, that you cannot rely on good intelligence. I mean, you--you just won't have it. No matter how good the intelligence agencies do, it ain't going to be there.

Amb. BREMER: Well, I disagree with you on that, too, as long we're having this colloquy here. I think one of the areas in which the American government and the European governments, if you take 1980 as your base point, has made more progresses in the area of collection of intelligence against terrorist groups and the sharing of that intelligence among friendly governments.

The Europeans were able to defeat the Marxist secular groups in Europe--Action Directe, the CCC in--in Belgium, the Bader Meinhof gang--primarily when they finally decided to start sharing intelligence on those groups. That was the breakthrough that brought about the demise of those groups by the late '80s. So it is an interesting problem. It is not uninteresting. It is important, and it is important for policymakers at the top level to put the emphasis on this. Of course, you're never going to have enough intelligence. Of course, there are going to be attacks that you can't prevent. But as the chairman pointed out, there are a number of cases which can't be discussed, obviously, in this kind of a hearing, where good intelligence, timely intelligence, was acted on and attacks were prevented. So I'm going to stick with the point. I think this really is the heart of the matter.

Dr. REINICKE: Could I just comment on this--on a couple of issues?

First of all, let me just say that Europeans have been somewhat successful using intelligence as a tool to prevent, but I'd just like to point out that in 1995, Germany was the country that was hit most in the entire world by terrorist attacks--ranks top; from different groups in international terror, but it ranks top. United States, zero international terrorism.

Intelligence is important. As we are sitting here today--and not many people know this--there's actually a meeting going on between Canada, the United States and Europe in sharing that information. It is not too successful yet. And it seems to me we have to consider intelligence gathering and sharing as one element in a long chain of evolving policy instruments. Intelligence can suppress terrorist attacks. It is very costly.

If you, from now on, decide, for the rest of the existence of this globe, you want to suppress terror, it gets very expensive. You have to start earlier. You have to rob terrorists from the sources--financial, infrastructure and otherwise, political support base, cultural support base, religious support base, economic--so that they cannot thrive on those and use those networks that I describe as a way to transmit their threats. Unless you do that, you will constantly face that issue.

And let me just address the question of intelligence on a domestic level. You, in introductory statement, raised the problem of intelligence. I think politically, domestically, it is impossible to use intelligence as the only and most effective instruments for the issues that you raised, Mrs. Strossen.

However, since I have the word, let me just respond to what you said. I agree with you that you say we're compromising the fundamental rights of US citizens, but, of course, so do terrorists. And that is what their purpose is. And we have to balance as to who we would like our fundamental rights to compromise. And that is the question about risk management. How much risk are we willing to take and how much measures--and I think the important thing is that we are aware of that; we're conscious of that. If we want to maintain our civil liberties, there are risks involved, and they can be costly. They will not be costly in the sense that the entire collective United States is threatened, but certain groups and individuals and regions in this country will be threatened, and we have to pay that price. If we're aware of that, if that's what the public wants, that is fine.

Prof. STROSSEN: Well, that's a perfect segue to a question I have been eager to pose to all of you following your--I agree with my fellow panelist--excellent presentations. And that is, we have been using the term `terrorist' not among ourselves so much, but in the larger public debate in the United States. The term `terrorist' is used with increasing profligacy. And not only in public discourse--every time there's a crime that involves violence lately, it seems that the word `terrorist' is immediately invoked, even if there is no particular or even when there's no evidence yet of a crime, as with respect to the TWA explosion. We still don't know the cause, and yet, it is immediately treated as if it is a terrorist incident, whatever that means, and then immediately becomes a springboard for the proposal of very draconian responses that invade civil liberties in a way that we have never deemed acceptable with respect to "ordinary crime," quote, unquote.

And so--and specifically with respect to intelligence. One of the many issues that's raised now is: To what extent do we break down what has been a firewall between the FBI, domestic law enforcement, collection of intelligence and the CIA? And so I think there are enormous policy implications and implications in terms of people's rights in how we use the term `terrorism' from a functional point of view. What specific kinds of violence are we talking about that cannot be redressed in--or addressed in the way we--in the means we use for the rest of our criminal justice policies?

And I think Dr. Telhami came the closest to addressing that. He offered one definition. If I may say so, what I take from the presentations is that there are different kinds of terrorist acts, which not only have to be distinguished from ordinary crime, but also have to be distinguished from each other in terms of what the appropriate response is. So I would really like to hear all of your comments, if that...

Mr. JENKINS: Let me take a shot at responding to some of the issues that you raise. First of all, you're absolutely correct that the term `terrorism' tends to be used promiscuously and applied to all sorts of things that are not, strictly speaking, terrorism as we would use it. It is difficult, other than urging some constraint on the part of our own political leadership and perhaps asking for some self-constraint on the part of the news media, that we can address that issue. And people are going to call a lot of things terrorism. Hopefully, people who are in a position to be heard publicly ought not to fan that process and contribute to the promiscuous use of the term.

Insofar as somehow distinguishing a terrorism from ordinary crime, here I have to raise a personal concern. While I can identify and even define terrorism as a phenomenon and identify a series of tactics that terrorists use, I don't know that I am particularly interested in distinguishing a corpus of law that defines terrorism as distinguished from ordinary crime. Crime is crime. We prosecute in this country for murder, for kidnapping, for willful destruction of property. And whether that is done for the purposes of personal greed or some higher political cause is an issue that the court may address in terms of the sentencing, but ought not to become the basis, as I say, for the elaboration of a set of laws that are anti-terrorism in nature. So I think we keep crime as crime in this country, and that's how we would treat crime.

That may not be the same approach abroad, because abroad, where we're dealing with, in some cases, states may be sponsoring terrorism or groups who may be--who may be engaged in warfare against us, then we may not always be able to treat terrorism within narrow confines of the law. That is, we may not always have to have courtroom quality evidence. We may not always be interested in the apprehension of a specific individual, but we may, rather, be interested in the interruption of activities of the specific group. So there's a different set of rules.

But in this country, I think we have to keep crime as crime, you know, and not contaminate the issue too much with attempting to have an official US definition of terrorism, as it applies to domestic law enforcement. It is an issue with regard to the collection of intelligence, but not to the prosecution of crime.

Mr. McCURDY: I think that's very good, and these responses have helped us kind of define the scope of the problem and some of the challenges facing policymakers. And I'd like to--and I think it offers a segue into looking at some of those options and responses that are facing legislators, executives all over the world and law enforcement officials.

In the past few months, the United States Congress has passed two pieces of legislation; one offered by the retiring senator from Georgia, Senator Nunn, on weapons of mass--defense against weapons of mass destruction, which is a part of the defense bill. In that legislation, he made a number of findings, but two that were particularly critical of US preparedness, or lack of preparedness. In one, he--and this is a direct quote, "The United States lacks adequate planning and countermeasures to address the threat of nuclear, radiological, biological and chemical terrorism." The second one and perhaps most directed to the US, was, "The US lacks effective policy coordination regarding the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

Then the Congress passed, in August of '96, the Aviation Security and Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, primarily in response to the TWA crash and the incident. And even though there is no clear evidence as of yet, the Aviation Security measures, chaired by the vice president, had been announced. The Anti-Terrorism Act primarily set up a commission to address a number--or, raise a number of questions and to try to find some policy recommendations. But one point in this--in addition, there were a series of commissions. The Brown Commission on Intelligence addressed the need for a coordinated response to global crime. They define it as global crime: international terrorism, narcotics trafficking, trafficking weapons of mass destruction and international organized crime. So they are trying to have a broader definition.

We talked about one of the policy instruments. We could probably spend an entire day talking about that. Having chaired the intelligence committee in Congress and serving on one of Director Deutch's commissions looking at weapons of mass destruction, I can assure you that there is a great deal of tension being focused within the intelligence community on these issues. But there are other instruments: the political and diplomatic, which we spoke of; prophylactic measures, trying to prevent attacks; controlling and restraining supply, such as technology, whether it's weapons of mass destruction, etc; deterrents, a big factor; and then enforcement and the law enforcement consequences; and in dealing with consequences of failure, which would be your response actions.

Do you care to comment, anyone, about the--perhaps the recent actions taken by policymakers, but any other comments about the policy instruments and what's viable, what's realistic and perhaps what is less--Ambassador?

Amb. BREMER: Let me address the question of sanctions, which was brought up a couple of times. First of all, sanctions do work, and they do work against terrorist states. And there's a good example, which was the sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Community in 1986 in October against Syria, which were sustained for enough time to persuade President Assad to expel the Abu Nidal terrorist group from Syria six months later. Sanctions, if they're put on with vigor, led by the United States, and if our allies follow, do work.

One of my fellow panelists said that the European Union agrees with sanctions, but only on a case-by-case basis, to which my answer is: In the last 10 years, they don't seem to have found a case where they've wanted to put on any sanctions. One of the problems, it seems to me, is that with the current policies--we know we have states which sponsor terrorism and continue to sponsor it.

And going to your point, Mr. Chairman, about trying to deter terrorism, you have to make an example of people who are sponsoring terrorism. Federal courts in the United States, five years ago, issued indictments for two Libyans for the bombing of Pan Am 103. There've been three Security Council resolutions passed asking the Libyans to turn these over. The Europeans have done nothing to support the rather feeble efforts by this administration to, in fact, make something happen in Libya. In the case of Iran--Germany and Japan are the largest creditors to Iran. The administration essentially sat by passively while those two states rescheduled the debt for Iran about two years ago.

Now one of the other panelists here suggested that the way to deal with Iran is not with a tough policy, because Iranian terrorism has increased. It seems to me the analogy there is it's as if the murder rate somehow increased in Washington--it's hard to see how it could be worse, but let's assume it's worse, and the reaction was to pull the police off the streets; to say it's not working. It seems to me that's the wrong analogy. The problem with putting pressure on Iran is we're getting no support from our allies. Now I am not sympathetic to the idea of unilateral legislation. I don't think it's usually a good way to do foreign policy. But the Europeans have never come up with any other idea with Iran, so I'm not surprised that the Congress decided to go ahead and act unilaterally.

Take the case of North Korea, another state designated by our government as a terrorist-supporting state. Basically, they blackmailed our government into providing them with new power reactors in order to get rid of their nuclear weapons. Or take Syria--again, on the State's--State Department's list of terrorist-supporting states--and it has now been visited almost 30 times by the secretary of state. It seems to me those kinds of measures send a message. And the message is not a message of resolute opposition to terrorism, but a message of weakness and in--and inconcern and, indeed, if I may, conceptual unclarity as to the kind of problem we face.

Diplomatic and political measures have an important role in counterterrorism, just as military covert action and intelligence do, but you've got to have a clear concept and you've got to put together a strategy and carry it out, and that's not happening.

Dr. TELHAMI: May I comment on this, since there was a reference to--at least, a misunderstanding of my position?

As you recall, my position was, toughness is very important. It's a very important component of fighting terrorism, but it has to be coupled with engagement and political incentives, not that you remove toughness. If you look, in fact, at the example that was given with Syria--yes, there was some toughness, but there was political engagement. Syria has been part of the political process. Look at the consequences with Iran, where there's been no payoff. There is increasing toughness and no political engagement. I mean, that's the contrast that works.

And I think if you make--if you want to just look at the issue of being tougher and relying more on intelligence, the constraint is not just merely civil liberties in this country or elsewhere. You look at even places where there was little concern for civil liberties; look at the Israeli experiment prior to the implementation of this agreement. You've had a situation where Israel was occupying the West Bank and Gaza. You had terrorism coming from the West Bank and Gaza against Israel. You had very, very sophisticated, effective Israeli intelligence. Israel put a lot of resources into that, because it was an existential issue as far as many Israelis were concerned. And instead of that declining, in fact, violent attacks increased.

So despite the fact that putting all--you know, making this a priority issue for Israel, no one is likely to do the same because not facing the same kind of problem right next door in the back yard where you have total control of the military, the police, the intelligence, and it still didn't work. I mean, that is the thing that we have to keep in mind. It isn't that toughness shouldn't be used as an instrument, but toughness alone just simply doesn't work.

Dr. REINICKE: Could I also just respond briefly to this, since there was a reference to conceptual clarity?

It may well be true that sanctions work against states, but it seems to me--and I guess there was, at least, some agreement on the panel and certainly in the political community that the primary threat is no longer state-sponsored terrorism. We are addressing ourselves to the wrong source of the problem. And expelling terrorists from Syria is not going to help. They're going to go elsewhere, maybe even unnoticed by the country that's hosting them; maybe even unnoticed by the bank that is laundering their money, because they don't know. It doesn't help. You're not addressing the source of the problem, and you're hurting many more people and cutting yourself off from the intelligence that you need to get the information. It is not going to help, except for those few cases where, indeed, we can prove state-sanctioned terrorism.

Amb. BREMER: Can I just say, in the case of Syria, it did help. Abu Nidal relocated to Libya and he hasn't been heard from since. It does help.

Mr. McCURDY: Nadine.

Prof. STROSSEN: I like Dr. Telhami's point that in many cases, repression breeds terrorism rather than the opposite. And that leads me back to the situation in this country. I was very struck by the fact, Mr. Chairman, that when you talked about congressional alleged responses to alleged terrorism, you mentioned two laws, but not the law that I think the administration and many members of Congress would call the cap stone of its anti-terrorism effort: the so-called anti-terrorism and effective death penalty act, which became law just about on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.

And I keep saying `so-called,' because my view is that it has a whole lot more to do with ordinary crime and with repressing civil liberties and doesn't offer any constructive response to terrorism as it's been defined here. And I find it curious that nobody has yet addressed that.

Do you all agree with me that that is not an effective part of our arsenal of response to terrorism?

Mr. McCURDY: It's a pitch down the middle, if you didn't recognize it. Some of you...

Prof. STROSSEN: And I'll take silence as agreement.

Mr. McCURDY: Of course, she's from New York...

Mr. ADELMAN: Yeah.

Mr. McCURDY: ...and so there's a big fielder out in the...

Mr. ADELMAN: Say, `Who's in right field?' `Who's in right field?'

Mr. McCURDY: OK. Anyone care to respond?

Mr. JENKINS: I--you know, I don't know about the issue of--to the degree that the death penalty is an effective deterrent for terrorism or any other form of crime. I mean, that theory is very much...

Prof. STROSSEN: But that wasn't new.

Mr. JENKINS: Yeah.

Prof. STROSSEN: Terroristic crimes were already subject to the death penalty.

Mr. JENKINS: Yeah. I was going to say, mine...

Mr. ADELMAN: Now we can kill them twice.

Mr. JENKINS: My understanding is...

Prof. STROSSEN: Now there's no habeas corpus...

Mr. JENKINS: Yeah.

Prof. STROSSEN: ...for any kind of criminal.

Mr. JENKINS: There is no question--I'm being realistic--that a terrorist incident creates a demand to do something, or at least to be seen to do something. And some of the things that are discussed, promised, threatened or even passed in the form of legislation may be no more than merely a black-letter version of the sense of emotional outrage that people feel. Sometimes even useful things get done as opposed to simply things that restate what we already have in place. And reference was made earlier by you, Mr. Chairman to the most recent set of measures passed as a result of the White House Commission on Aviation Security. And let me, for a moment, just address that, because I happen to be a member of that commission.

First of all, it makes absolutely no difference to me in terms of the work of that commission whether TWA was caused by terrorist sabotage or, and as yet, undetermined catastrophic mechanical failure. Apart from TWA 800, there had been more than 70 attempts to plant bombs onboard airliners. These have resulted in at least 15 crashes, killing over 1,700 people. So the threat is genuine. We know that terrorism is likely to persist. We know that commercial aviation has been defined by terrorists as part of the battleground, and we have the most recent example of a plot uncovered in the Philippines by Mr. Ramzi Yousef and his co-conspirators, who were convicted in New York of plotting to bring down 12 US airliners.

So the threat is an actual threat. The specific measures recommended by the commission primarily addressed the deployment--the increased deployment of explosives detection technology and change in luggage handling procedures. Many of these same measures have been recommended by the Bush commission that was created after Pan Am 103. So it was not as if we had to grope around and discover some new systems. The fact is that people knew it had to be done. And in that sense, I think TWA 800 represented more an opportunity to get some things done, as opposed to being the cause.

Within those measures--I don't want to have those measures mischaracterized either, with one exception: I don't believe that those measures, which, as I say, dealt with explosive detection technology, bomb-sniffing dogs and luggage handling procedures, were regarded as posing any peril to civil liberties. The single issue that was raised when we listened to the representative of the American Civil Liberties Union in open hearing was concern that a profile--passenger profile, as an instrument of increasing airline security, not become an instrument of discrimination. And, of course, when there's any type of profiling and when there's any type of files created or access to make some type of distinction between passengers who you will look at more closely vs. those who you will pass more easily through the system, that is always an issue and, clearly, the commission has to address that.

But apart from that, as I say, I think the measures were pretty pragmatic and were, in my view--although, obviously, I have a personal interest in this--were a fairly pragmatic approach to what has been a long-identified problem and not dramatically different from what our democratic allies in Europe have been doing and are doing with regard to airline security.

Prof. STROSSEN: There's one other aspect of it, though, that does implicate civil liberties not only for those who might be discriminatorially singled out for profiling, but for all actual and potential airplane passengers. And, Mr. Jenkins, when I read the biographical material about you to prepare for this panel, I discovered you're the only person I know of who flies more miles a year than I do. I fly about 200,000, and I read that you fly about 300,000. So I certainly have a very deep personal interest, almost as great as yours, in airplane safety and security. And I do think that most of the recommendations--in fact, I was shocked that these are measures that are not already in place. I didn't realize we didn't have matching luggage with passengers in this country, as we do overseas.

But in addition to the profiling, what is very troubling to us--and I would think to all Americans who cherish privacy--is the compiling of a massive database of information about who is traveling, where they are going, on which airlines and with whom. And that database to be subject to computer analysis for purposes of coming up with the profiles. I agree, if the profiling is based on discrimination, that is a separate problem, but I think all of us have some legitimate concern about not giving up so much privacy as a condition of flying.

Mr. JENKINS: Good point. And let me just briefly address it.

Profiles can be used to identify those who may be more likely to carry out some act of sabotage. Profiles may be used to more quickly pass through those who would be less likely. The information--much of the information that would be in the databases that you speak about is really directed toward the latter. That is, we voluntarily--many frequent fliers and travelers voluntarily give up information. If you're a member of the Frequent-Flier Program, in fact, the airlines will have a profile of your flying history, how often you fly, how many miles, what airlines you use. And--and we do give that up readily. It is in a file. And if that means that the saboteur is less likely to be the frequent traveler--now I'm not saying--apart from whether that's always accurate or not; I don't know how many miles a year Ramzi used to travel before his apprehension, and it appears to have been a fair number. But I don't know that he was in any of the Frequent-Flier Programs and--and provided the various biographical information that--that those often entail.

We also voluntarily give up a great deal of information whenever we use our credit cards and our profiles of us from that. Now that is a voluntary surrendering of information that, again, is used frequently in the commercial area to know what your purchasing habits are. We can choose not to have credit cards and use cash, and we won't have those. What I'm saying is that much of this--it is not a database that is compiled--a vast database attempting to identify in all cases the villains on the basis of some indicators. I'm not sure what those indicators would be but, rather, to identify those about whom there is already a great deal of information and perhaps you can deal with more simply in the security measures. Prof. STROSSEN: I just have to point out that--in response--that a basic core element of privacy is the notion that if you voluntarily give up information for one purpose, it may not be used for another purpose, it may not be exchanged with another source and it's the linking and the creation of a database that will be open to many, including government officials, that I think should be troubling to all of us.

Mr. McCURDY: Ken Adelman had a question and Dr. Reinicke.

Mr. ADELMAN: Let me just say that because time is short what I take away from this panel is that there are possible five things that the United States government and other governments can do in this area.

Number one is the diplomatic solution and I think we all agree that it's necessary, regardless of its application or its effect on terrorism, peace process in the Middle East. We don't have to spend a lot of time on that. And the relationship between that peace process and terrorism is one of dispute, but it--but it's a--good, in and of itself.

Number two is greater intelligence sharing and I applaud that and, you know, we should pursue that as much as we possibly can. The trade-off there is, as my panel member made so clear and elegant, that there is a trade-off with civil liberties. I myself would not care at all if the Internet features my travel schedule or almost any information, so I don't have that kind of sensitivity, to tell you the truth, that this kind of information could be used. When we take a plane, it seems a very public act and I don't think that there is the right of privacy involved in--in that, so that wouldn't be a fear of mine, anyway. But I understand that some people could have it as a fear.

Number three is the whole idea of sanctions and the relationship of sanctions to the incidence of terrorism. Ambassador Bremer thinks it's a big relationship, Mr. Reinicke thinks it's not a relationship. But it seems to me that it's hard to make the point that there's no relationship. I agree. My inclinations are with Ambassador Bremer, that it's good that Libya is and has been, since the TWA bombing and its refusal of giving up the two alleged perpetuators of that terrorism--it's good that they don't have any airplane flights in there, that they're ostracized in that nature. And I hope it goes on forever. So I think there is something to the sanctions, but anyway, I understand the dispute.

Number four is technology, that we should increase our technology. I don't have a sense from the panel on how much that's going to help us. In the past, I've been told before that that could be--enormous advancements in this.

And number five is the dirty little subject that no one ever mentioned, which is bombing terrorist sites, knocking off or doing something to these terrorists. And that has been, like I say, unmentioned. It was a raging debate, as Ambassador Bremer knows, in the 1980s--whether you go into Libya--not Libya, Lebanon and Syria, and go for the camps--how well you know about where are the camps, the relationship between the camp and the incident. We went through all those with enormous disputes between Secretary of State George Schultz and Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger, and we went through it all. And I came out, anyway, muddied in my mind on where that all stood, and that hasn't been heard of very much since.

I would like, if it's all right, Mr. Chairman, with the very little time we have left to get the panel's reaction on these five to-do measures.

Mr. McCURDY: It's an excellent segue for our next panelist anyway and why why don't we--if you want to address those points and, since Jamie Gorelick is going to talk about the administration's concerns with regard to vulnerability of infrastructure and other US facilities, private and public, and the potential for increased threat from nuclear, biological and chemical, you might, if you have any comments about the technology issue, feel free. And I think when he uses the term `bombings,' he's really talking about attribution and retaliation, which obviously is one of those responses, usually in the case of failed prevention and deterrents, but we have often gotten there as well.

Dr. TELHAMI: Well, let me just refer to this last one, since the others were discussed, and as you suggested, I think none of us really took the bombing terrorist sites as an option. But it is interesting to look at it in an historical perspective. And one thing you have to be careful about is that the--you don't want the medicine to be worse than the illness, and very often that is a problem in terms of finding what targets to hit, where--particularly when you have non-state actors, but even where you have state actors, I think--you look at the Libyan case. I mean, we certainly took the very tough measure early in the '80s, went to the extent of bombing Qaddafi's own house. And our position is that they're responsible for the bombing of the Pan Am flight, which followed.

Now clearly the relationship is not very clear between the consequence for terrorism. It may be a good--there is a good case for even punitive retaliation. I think if there is a--if, in fact, a state ordered the killing of American soldiers on Saudi soil, the US is going to have to retaliate in a very tough fashion, but you need evidence. But if you have it, regardless of what the consequence will be for terrorism, I think there's a very good case for the credibility issue, for the issue of--that you do it. But we have to be clear that that is not the relationship between retaliation and terrorism. It is something that might be good, in itself, in some cases, but not in all cases.

Dr. REINICKE: Well, you hope that there's a learning process there.

Dr. TELHAMI: Sure.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you. Mr. Jenkins.

Mr. JENKINS: On the issue of military retaliation, I'll agree that if the evidence is there, certainly it must remain an option. In fact, I would go one step further and to say that when you can prove an act of war has been committed against you that we, in fact--I'd like to see administrations march up to Congress and put the heat on Congress and say, `Let's get a formal declaration of belligerency and then take action under that,' because that would at least provide a sound formal, legal basis, as well as an expression of American--of representatives of the American public, that this is worthy of taking military action. And being a veteran of Vietnam, I have great concerns about military action that do not necessarily have the support and sanction of--of the American people.

There are going to be cases where overt military retaliation is not going to be possible, is not going to be appropriate, and therefore, I think we also must include covert operations as an option. And covert operations can range from, in very, very limited circumstances--special circumstances--the use of force all the way over to simply interfering with financial--interfering with financial networks, conducting psychological operations and doing other things to disrupt other--other types of attacks. So I think that must remain an option.

One final point on retaliation or whether it's covert or--covert operations to prevent or retaliation after, and that is if we do move into the realm of weapons of mass destruction--if we have evidence that groups not under state control are truly acquiring a capability for mass destruction, then I would assert that that represents a responsibility of all nations and, indeed, a justification for any nation to take appropriate measures. If possible, hopefully multilaterally it can be done, but if that is not possible, then if unilateral, pre-emptive action is necessary to prevent the clandestine fabrication of nuclear weapons or the recovery of a stolen nuclear device or of serious amount and of a chemical capability, then I would assert that, under those terms, not military action but even military pre-emptive action would be justified.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you. Ambassador.

Amb. BREMER: Well, I entirely agree with that point, and I think, in effect, with--a policymaker has to have at his or her command a full spectrum of action, ranging from diplomatic and political, in which I would include sanctions, all the way over to covert action and, beyond that, to military action. And the real problem, again, goes back to the willingness to use these tools. It's one thing to say you have them; you've got to be willing to use them.

And, in fact, at least for the last decade, we haven't really been willing to use the far end of the spectrum. Covert action is difficult because you got to have good intelligence. We go back to the problem we discussed earlier. But military action can never be excluded. These are acts of war when they are carried out overseas, as Mr. Jenkins points out, and there certainly is no reason not to use military action if you have the information at hand that would justify it.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you. Finally, Doctor.

Dr. REINICKE: Absolutely. We have a broad range of tools and I think we should use them all, but I think it's important to understand that the world has changed. And, yes, we should use them against state-sponsored terrorism, but as the report by the State Department indicates ...(unintelligible) Iran and Libya over the last year have not been a major sponsor of terrorism, and yet, we're sitting here and debating the issue. States are not the only sources and origins anymore of terrorism. States are not the instruments that terrorists use to perpetrate and attack other countries.

Sanctions are good. I fully support them if we can target them at specific states. They may miss the target if terrorists are able to evade them and remain flexible and dynamic to avoid them. We have to look at all the range of instruments. We have to engage early, I would even argue earlier than political and diplomatic, but include the economic incentives that we have available in order to integrate those countries and rob terrorists of the base and foundations that they thrive on.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you very much. And, gentlemen, thank you for your time this morning. Your comments and your answers have been superb and, I think, very enlightening, which is part of the objective of the Council on Foreign Relations: to inform the public about international and domestic issues that concern all of us. Just one parting comment. We talked a little bit about actions within the Congress sometimes politically charged. I think it was Madison or one of the Federalist Papers that--I recall the quote said that, "Promptitude of action in the Legislature is more often an evil than a benefit." So we are concerned about careful consideration of these issues, and I think your testimony and comments this morning certainly add to that. And again, thank you very much. With that, we'll convene our second panel. If we can, we'll have--in the next session, we have Jamie Gorelick, former general counsel of the Department of Defense and currently the deputy attorney general of the US Department of Justice. We certainly welcome Ms. Gorelick today. We understand she has a very busy schedule and we were scheduled to end at 12:00. We carried over about two minutes from our schedule, so we're not doing too bad. Again, Ms. Gorelick has a very distinguished resume and career in public service. And we're certainly delighted that she's taken time to join the Council on Foreign Relations panel this morning. And with that...

States are not the

Ms. JAMIE GORELICK (Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice): Mr. Chairman, I'm delighted to be here. I call you Mr. Chairman because I'm missing the opportunities to testify with Congress out these days. We have no one to call us before them, and one of the reasons I was happy to appear before you today was I didn't want to get out of practice. So thank you for standing in for your former colleagues. And good day to you, Mr. Adelman and Ms. Strossen, good friends all. And I applaud the Council for hosting this important debate. So as to try to keep within your format, what I'll try to do is I'll submit my formal comments for the record, if the chairman will so admit them.

Mr. McCURDY: They certainly are admitted. And this--since we're not formal, like we used to be in the Congress, we'll certainly publish that and appreciate your submission.

Ms. GORELICK: Thank you. And then let me make some brief oral remarks and then we can proceed to a dialogue. First, let me say that protecting our country from both foreign and domestic terrorism is a key mission of the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice is one place in the whole government where information about both domestic and international terrorism comes, and we are unique in that respect.

Terrorism is violence that is designed or calculated to achieve a political or social or economic goal, and it is the ultimate manifestation of cowardice. It is violence that is random, it is anonymous and it is visited upon helpless people who have usually done nothing--nothing to provoke that violence. Now American citizens and interests are prime targets of international terrorists. According to the State Department, we are the victims of approximately 40 percent of all terrorist acts, at least have been between 1990 and 1995.

Our policy at home and abroad has three elements. First, we do everything we can to deter and to prevent terrorist acts. Second, when they do occur--when terrorist acts do occur, we respond quickly, decisively and with a full range of law enforcement and other options that are available. And third, we work with our friends around the world to interdict terrorists and to ensure that they do not go unpunished.

Now all of this must and can be done without undermining our precious civil rights and civil liberties. Let me elaborate on these three areas. First, deterrents and prevention. The message has gone out consistently that we will not accede to terrorist demands, and that is very, very important. Within the executive branch, we have strengthened the relationships between law enforcement and intelligence while respecting the longstanding traditions and limitations on direct intelligence community participation in criminal investigations, an issue I feel very strongly about. But we cannot afford to have critical intelligence in the intelligence community that does not find its way to law enforcement or to have law enforcement know about cues that it might be able to give the intelligence community to allow it to operate more effectively.

We have new mechanisms of coordination, ranging from my biweekly meetings with the deputy director of Central Intelligence to a comprehensive board that brings together all of law enforcement with all elements of the intelligence community. And these mechanisms are used to work out the differences that do arise between our two communities from time to time. We have also placed personnel from the law enforcement community in the intelligence community and vice versa, so that we have developed on the ground much better working relationships.

We have developed a law enforcement and intelligence network that has as its goal the development of information that relates to the planned activities of terrorists, the goal of which is to stop them before they act. And we have been successful in this. There are, obviously, many instances that are not public and that I cannot address, but some that are public, I will address. These are the cases that we have, in fact, brought to justice in our country. Last month, a jury convicted Ramzi Yousef and two accomplices of a plot to bring down simultaneously two dozen American airliners around the world. The plot was foiled through the cooperative efforts of the FBI, the CIA, authorities in the Philippines, authorities in Pakistan and other agencies. The result was to save untold American lives.

Second, in October of 1995, Sheik Omar Abdel al Rahman and nine followers were convicted of plotting a campaign to bomb sites in New York City, including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the United Nations, the FBI headquarters. And here again, aggressive law enforcement efforts prevented the loss of many, many lives.

The legislative efforts that we have made have also been keyed toward prevention. In the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, which was signed in April, we now have new tools to prevent terrorists from entering the United States, to remove terrorists already within our borders and to prevent--and very importantly, to prevent the provision of material support within our borders to terrorists in the United States and abroad. That act also makes it a crime for any person in the United States to participate in a conspiracy to commit a terrorist act anywhere in the world, so long as one overt act is conducted--is undertaken here; and thus, we can reach all of the co-conspirators all around the world.

The second prong is the response to acts of terrorism. Notwithstanding all the efforts that we make to prevent terrorism, in a free society, prevention is not always successful. Terrorists exploit the very freedoms that we seek to preserve. And when an act of terrorism does occur, we try everything we can to bring our full authority to bear in apprehending and punishing them.

If a terrorist act is sponsored by a rogue state, we will use and have used military and economic sanctions. We've just been discussing these. For example, when Iraqi intelligence targeted former President Bush for assassination while he was visiting Kuwait, President Clinton ordered the US military to attack and retaliate against Iraq. After the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which was tracked to Libya, we obtained a UN resolution limiting the ability of that country to carry out transactions in the international community. And these multilateral efforts were recently supplemented when the president signed the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which tightens sanctions even further.

We will and have used the criminal sanction, and the important thing here is that our memories are very long. We do not forget a single terrorist act. For example, in June of 1985, Fawaz Unez hijacked a Royal Jordanian Airlines flight between Beirut, Lebanon, and Amman, Jordan. Two American passengers were among the hostages. In September of 1987, Unez was lured into international waters in the Mediterranean Sea, where he was arrested by the FBI. And in 1989 he was convicted in the United States of conspiracy and sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment. And that conviction has recently been upheld.

In November of 1985, Omar Ali Rezaq hijacked an Air Egypt flight and murdered both Israeli and US passengers. I don't know if you remember this, but he was just taking them out one by one and shooting them in--in the head. Following his release by Maltese authorities after serving only seven years, he was arrested by FBI agents when he was a passenger on a flight that stopped in a North African country. With the assistance of that country, he was brought to the United States and just this last Monday he was sentenced to life imprisonment. So we will pursue people wherever they may be. We will follow them, and we will get them.

The reach of our apprehension efforts is reflected also in the conviction of Ramzi Yousef and his co-defendants. Each of those co-defendants was apprehended with the assistance of a different country, and some of these countries have not been our usual partners in these efforts, so I would emphasize the importance of international cooperation and the building of an international consensus against terrorism.

In addition, it is our policy to apply an arsenal of extraterritorial terrorism offenses to people responsible for these crimes. We need to adjust our jurisdiction to the new kinds of threats that we are facing. And the recently enacted legislation addresses the assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction over the terrorist use of biological weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons.

And a final point I would make about legislation in this area and the support we've gotten from Congress: We now have $1 billion in additional resources to apply to terrorism. These new tools are fine, but you need to have the resources to implement the tools and use them. And we have gotten that support from Congress recently and we will be using them. The funding just became available this fiscal year '97. And so I think you will see a much broader effort than we have been able to commit in the past.

Finally, international cooperation. It is clear, even from what I've just said, that no country can wage a successful war on terrorism alone. We have had countless friends and helpers in our successful efforts so far. We have made a mainstay of our policy the denial of safe haven to international terrorists. We have talked about this in every international forum, and the president has personally made this a key element of his foreign policy.

Since 1993, we've negotiated extradition treaties with Bolivia, with Hungary, with Jordan, with Poland, just to name a few. And this is part of our `nowhere to hide' policy. These treaties are not just pieces of paper. The US-Jordan treaty, which was signed in March of last year, was the first extradition treaty with an Arab country. And within days of its entry into force, we submitted a request for the extradition of one of the defendants in the World Trade Center bombing, and he is now sitting in prison in New York awaiting trial in that case. So we are strategically emphasizing which countries we need cooperation from and working with them to get that cooperation.

One example of international cooperation is, of course, the aftermath of Pan Am 103. There was a joint investigation with Scottish authorities. We freely shared information. The breakthrough in the case came from a chip from a circuit board that was discovered by a Scottish investigator and clothing from the suitcase which had been housing the bomb. It was identified by a US bomb expert as being part of a small number of devices sold by a Swiss firm to Libya. So there was cooperation among 15 different countries that led to the solving of that particular crime. And similarly, with regard to obtaining custody, we have achieved the rendition of suspected terrorists into our hands on six different occasions in the last three years, including two of the individuals involved in the World Trade Center bombing.

When we haven't been able to get people back to this country, we have assisted other countries in the prosecution of terrorists. For example, Mohammed Ali Hammadi, who was indicted here in the District of Columbia for the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the murder of Navy diver Robert Stethem--he was arrested in Germany. We were refused extradition. And so we worked with our German counterparts to provide information that led ultimately to his conviction. He's convi--he is serving a life sentence in Germany.

Similarly, Mohammed Rashid, who was indicted in the 1982 bombing of a Pan Am flight from Tokyo to Honolulu--he was arrested in Athens. We tried to get him extradited. We failed, but we have worked with the prosecutors in Greece and he is now serving a 15-year sentence there.

As I indicated before, the president has made this a mainstay of his foreign policy. He will be leading the G-7 P-8 nations in the coming year. And, you know, they include the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Canada, Russia--our principal partners. And he has made his top priority a cohesive response to terrorism. He's called for tougher bomb detection standards and security at airports, stronger investigative tools, the simple measure of getting standardized passenger and cargo manifests on international flights, the development of new international conventions on terrorist bombing, an agreement to outlaw biological weapons, an agreement to work collaboratively on research and development regarding explosives, and to adopt mechanisms to prevent terrorist fund-raising.

These are among the efforts that we are making. It is a very significant commitment from this administration in a very cohesive way. This is a threat which is very frightening and very real. And the tools that one uses to attack it run a gamut from intelligence collection to military options. They require close coordination. They require lots of cooperation. And they require sometimes slow and painstaking efforts. But they do pay off in a very, very important fight. Thank you.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you, Miss Gorelick, for your statement and for your work. I just have two questions and--and one is somewhat lengthy, but you know the substance of it, so I don't think you have to take notes on it. And then I will turn it over to my colleagues to let them ask their questions.

Recently, Congress passed a law creating a new commission on terrorism. And within it, there are a number of areas that the commission is charged to examine in the following months. One is the efficacy and appropriateness of federal efforts to prevent, detect, investigate and prosecute acts of terrorism. One is the coordination of counterterrorism efforts among federal departments and agencies, and federal coordination of law enforcement with state and local law enforcement. And a quick aside: Congress is always quick to criticize a lack of coordination within the executive branch, but with its own antiquated and disjointed committee structure, it often contributes to the problem itself.

Having said that, continuing with the commission's charge, the ability and utilization of counterintelligence efforts to infiltrate and disable and disrupt international terrorist organizations and their activities; impact the federal immigration laws and policies on acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries; effectiveness--well, the safety issues have been addressed in airline safety; extend an effectiveness to prevent cooperative efforts with foreign nations to prevent, detect, investigate--you've mentioned some of that; impact the present counterterrorism efforts due to the failure to expend and utilize resources and authority previously provided by Congress for the implementation of enhanced counterterrorism activities, and the reasons why these resources are not expended in a timely way--sounds like a little bit of a partisan shot, but you can handle that--examine the capability of the United States intelligence community to do most of its responsibilities in terrorism; and examine all present laws relating to the collection and dissemination of personal information on individuals by law enforcement or other government entities; and the necessity for additional protections to prevent and deter the inappropriate collection and dissemination of such information, an area near and dear to Ms. Strossen's interest.

Now having laid that out, I guess the basic question is: In this--creation of this panel, do you believe the administration has addressed these issues? Is there more work to be done? In what areas do you believe the administration can act? And then after responding to that, I have one quick question about your role on the--as chairing the vulnerability studies on national infrastructure under PDD 39. But, if you would, on the...

Ms. GORELICK: I think the commission was an effort on the part of Congress to make sure that there was some continuing oversight over the collective efforts that are focused on terrorism. I actually think that we are reasonably well coordinated, given that you have the Defense Department, the intelligence community, the State Department, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department and others very much involved in issues relating to terrorism. We spend a lot of time coordinating. It is not amenable to having one czar. It just is not. And so we spend a great deal of time talking to each other. And there are various mechanisms for doing that, some that we inherited from the Bush administration, some that we've changed and made more permanent and more direct.

So I think that we are doing a good job, but we have much to do. For example, we were given authority to establish a terrorism center at the FBI to provide one central source for information of--that all law enforcement agencies could utilize. And that's something that one would have thought, you know, we should have had. And we need to have it. We've just gotten funding for it. We are putting it--standing it up, as we say, and I think it's a very important thing for us to do. But there is much to be done. And I welcome the continued oversight of Congress and the continued interest. I think, actually, sporadic interest is not helpful; continuing interest is helpful.

It cannot, however, expect that when it provides funding that it will--that the funds will immediately be spent. For example, one of the criticisms is that we haven't deported anyone yet under the alien removal court. Well, you don't pass a piece of legislation in April and have a court established in August. You have to establish rules. You--the chief justice has to nominate judges. They have to have background checks. We are proceeding very, very quickly. The chief justice has just named the judges, and we are proceeding with their background checks. We have a set of draft rules. But I think we need to be realistic about the timing that progress will take.

Mr. McCURDY: A quick comment on the infrastructure study and...

Ms. GORELICK: The--are you talking about the vulnerability assessment...

Mr. McCURDY: Mm-hmm.

Ms. GORELICK: ...or the commission on information on information infrastructure?

Mr. McCURDY: You're actually working on both.

Ms. GORELICK: Yes.

Mr. McCURDY: It's interesting. In the previous panel, there was very little discussion as to the vulnerability of US interests or international interests in the information era--information warfare or terrorism.

Ms. GORELICK: Right. Let me address it, because I think this is one of the most important challenges that we will face in the next few years and I've likened the--the need here to the Manhattan Project. And I think that we need a very innovative, very aggressive response to the problem we have in this country, which is that our national well-being rests on an increasingly interconnected infrastructure. Our power grids, our telecommunications system, our banking system, our gas and oil pipelines, our transportation system are all increasingly linked together. Now that has many, many benefits for our society, but it is an enormous potential vulnerability because if you take down one piece of it, the other pieces may fall as well. And you can wreak havoc with very little investment of time or money and very little personal risk, because you can do--you can invade our computers here from abroad via the Internet and otherwise.

So I feel that both our physical infrastructure and our information infrastructure are quite vulnerable. And we developed a proposal that went to the president in July and he signed an executive order establishing a commission. We're a unique commission that will be a partnership of not only governmental but the private sector to work together to harden those industries against a computer and physical attack.

I liken it to the Manhattan Project because it needs the same very innovative approach to technology and the same partnership between private sector and the public sector. But I think that this is something that we need to be extremely vigilant about and that certainly we in the Justice Department are being vigilant about. The FBI has been given by the president interim authority in the period of time until the commission comes out with its report and its recommendations are implemented to do what it can to harden our infrastructure against attack.

Prof. STROSSEN: Ms. Gorelick, thank you very much for your statement. And as Chairman McCurdy said, thank you for your work in protecting our safety. And I also appreciate your statement, which I know you've made on regular occasions, that you want to protect our safety without diminishing our civil liberties. So I'm glad we share both goals. I do have a couple concerns--it won't surprise you--about a number of the measures that you referred to from both points of view because I do not understand how they will effectively protect us against terrorism, but to me, it seems that the costs in terms of civil liberties are very high.

One is the, in my view, misnamed Anti-Terrorism Act that passed in April, and you weren't here during the first session, but it was interesting that none of the expert witnesses even referred to it and, when I raised the subject, didn't credit it with doing anything effective to enhance our safety, except one person referred to death penalties, which, as you know, already existed for terrorist crimes. With respect to that law, you specifically referred to putting in--increased controls over who can enter this country, over who can provide material support and over who can be deported.

Now before I get back to those, I do want to say you mentioned a number of successful cases where we have successfully apprehended, prosecuted and convicted people involved in terrorist acts before this legislation was passed. So the first question is: Why do we need any additional investigative or law enforcement authority? I'm concerned that the increased powers that have been extended in these three areas reach beyond those who actually threaten physical violence because, as you know, previous law already made it possible to keep them out of the country, to keep the provision of material support away from those who fostered actual violence and to allow deportation of those who did.

It seems to me that what the new law has done is to go beyond people who engage in dangerous acts to target people who have dangerous ideas. It raises a lot of the specters of guilt by association that I thought we learned was not an effective way for this country to proceed during the McCarthy era. I understand that, with respect to deportation, for example, people can be deported from this country, as long as they are not citizens, based on secret evidence in secret courts as a result of the immigration legislation that was recently passed. They don't even get summaries of the evidence that is used against them. Instead, those summaries are presented to a lawyer not of their own choosing. Clearly this raises very, very fundamental concerns in terms of due process rights, rights to confront your--those who testify against you and right to counsel.

Indeed, some aspects of the so-called anti-terrorism law, in my view, don't even purport to deal with even alleged terrorists. For example, the enormous inroads that have been made on the right of habeas corpus with respect to people who are accused and convicted of all kinds of crimes in state courts that don't have anything to do with terrorism. Likewise, the number of restrictions on immigrants and expedited deportation, for example, of people who have--even are lawful residents of this country who have committed a crime many years ago and since then have amassed a very positive record, have paid taxes, have developed ties to the community--many of them are now in detention centers awaiting summary deportation. And I understood that even the president had said that at least those aspects of the law he didn't think were constructive and that he would do something to--to countermand.

The second basic category of legislation that you touched on that raises civil liberties concerns in my mind has to do with the traditional firewall between the CIA and intelligence-gathering activities and the FBI. And I appreciated, again, your expressed commitment to maintaining that. But as I understand it, the 1997 intelligence authorization bill contained a provision which really does undermine that traditional separation by allowing the CIA to be tasked by the FBI to collect information, even when there is no foreign intelligence purpose for that information. Ms. GORELICK: Let me try to touch on a number of the issues that you raise. First, with regard to the summary deportation proceedings that are permitted or mandated, frankly, by the terrorism act, we oppose those and have been trying to get rid of them. They don't really serve any useful purpose. It was an immigration effort that slipped in somehow to the terrorism bill.

But with regard to the prohibition, for example, on fund-raising, I don't believe that people in this country have a right to give money to terrorist organizations. And if we--the procedure is if we have information that demonstrates that an organization is a terrorist organization, we publish that. The organization has the right to come in and challenge it. If they do not successfully challenge it, we publish the name. And then if you make a contribution to that--to that group, you can be charged. Now I think that that is completely appropriate because we cannot afford to have our moneys going to support terrorist activities. And I think that's a--tha--material support for terrorism is something that should not go on in this country.

Prof. STROSSEN: But first, you talked about terrorist organizations and then you talked about terrorist activities. And I certainly agree that somebody who is financing an--intentionally and knowingly financing a terrorist activity should not be allowed to do that. I think it's a different matter if you're talking about an organization which has been branded terrorist--for example, the IRA. If somebody is giving funding, let's say, to a hospital that's affiliated with the IRA, a purely humanitarian effort, it seems to me that person should not be branded because the same organization may also engage in terrorist activities.

Ms. GORELICK: The easy solution to that the statute says that if an organ--foreign organization engages in terrorist activity, which activity threatens the security of the United St--of--of the United States or US nationals, the secretary of state can denominate them a terrorist organization. The simple solution for such an organization is to set up a separate organization for the funding of hospitals. What's happening now is that you have a group like Hamas raising money in this country and giving 90 percent of it to hospitals and 10 percent to terrorist activities. I don't think that's acceptable.

Now second, with regard to the expulsion of terrorists, when we have intelligence information that an individual is en--is engaging in terrorist activities in the United States and we want--we want to get rid of him, we want this person out of this country, but we don't want to expose the source of the information, because that source gives us information about what else the people in the organization are doing, we were put to a--a Hobson's choice.

Now bear in mind, the people who would be subject to this expulsion are not US citizens. And even if they're lawful per--permanent residents, they have rights beyond the rights that they are required to have under the Constitution under this procedure, so that they would get a summary approved by an independent federal district court judge--an unclassified summary of the information. They would--this procedure only takes place if the judge finds that the provision of the--if the judge finds that the alien's continued presence in the United States and the provision of a summary would cause irreparable harm to national security or death or serious bodily injury, then the person can proceed without an unclassified summary or be given a special attorney.

We have tried to--to structure this in such a way that you go out of your way to protect the classified information and to give the person the information that they need to contest the expulsion order. But we do not want to be put in a position we--where we have to choose between keeping a terrorist here and revealing our sources. Let me make--I know you--you've given me a very long list and I know we have other questions to address. Let me address the tasking issue: If we know that there is an organization operating in the United States which has members abroad who are directing potential terrorist activities in the United States.

We ought to be able to ask the intelligence community, if the collection would not be against the US person and would be abroad--the prohibition is on--the prohibition that is important to maintain is the CIA should never be collecting information about US citizens. It should never be collecting information in the United States about US citizens. If there--if there is information that we need abroad that will help us in preventing a terrorist act here, I think we ought to be able to have it. Now I do think it needs to be subject to very st--strict rules. And the tasking provision which just passed will be subject to very strict attorney general guidance and--and approval of taskings. But I--I think other than to replicate the CIA abroad by having a whole coterie of FBI agents abroad, I don't see how we can go without that information.

Mr. McCURDY: Thank you. Mr. Adelman.

Mr. ADELMAN: Thank you very much, Ms. Gorelick, for your very good testimony...

Ms. GORELICK: Thank you.

Mr. ADELMAN: ...and very straight answers. In your testimony where you're talking about the future and your G-7 meetings with President Clinton, I'm sure that the Dole administration is going to appreciate your--the groundwork that the Clinton administration laid on those future G-7 meetings. So let me ahead of time thank you on behalf of the group for that great groundwork you have.

Ms. GORELICK: We can talk about this after...

Mr. ADELMAN: Onto a more real subject, two--I have two questions. Number one is: Looking over the technology which you mentioned, and aside from your Manhattan approach, you know, for protecting in--information--aside from that, in terms of not just detection of terrorists, but generally, I guess, it's prime detection, what are the most exciting technologies that might come along that you're researching now, whether they pan out or not, but that--you know, that we may not have heard about that you think, `My, gosh, this will make a difference in 10 years' time in the whole fight against terrorism and against crime'?

And secondly, you say in your testimony--and that's the purpose of this panel--that the threat is there; it's very frightening, it's very real. Under your bailiwick at the Justice Department, you have drugs, you have crime, you have all kinds of things that are some of the most serious problems in America. Generally speaking, putting this in a larger context for the morning, is terrorism something that we really should be frightened about, or given all the other plagues--your other nine plagues or your 10 plagues in your department, is it something that, you know, is a problem? Yes--it's serious, yes, but in the scope of things, it ain't all that much.

Ms. GORELICK: Well, let me address your last question first. I think that terrorism is a very real threat, not because it is as commonplace as the sale of narcotics on our streets but because the isolated event has such a tremendous impact on our society. It is potentially destabilizing. It makes people lose the sense of confidence and freedom that they have in walking the streets. And so it's very, very difficult, I think, to measure the relative importance by numbers of events.

If, for example, the World Trade Center bombing, as bad as it was, had been what the perpetrators had intended, which was to bring the whole building down, think of the response of the American people. If Ramsey Yousef had been successful in bringing down simultaneously 12 airliners--US airliners flying around the--the Pacific, think about how people would have thought about venturing out. If the bridges and tunnels in New York had been exploded, as Sheik Rahman and his followers would have done, think about how--what people would have felt about their society.

So while I--while, to be sure, we spend a great deal of time and energy on violent crime, on white-collar crime, on narcotics, which are very, very important to--also to a sense of well-being in our communities, I think the prevention of terrorism is just critical--absolutely critical. And frankly, I think the American people expect it of us. If the American people thought that this was something that we were saying was maybe not something that would get the--our highest priority, I think they would be shocked and appalled. So we feel that we have to literally pull out all the stops and do everything that we can.

In terms of new technologies, obviously, taggants, which we have been researching and looking for authority to research into--taggants are chemicals that you can place in something that would tell you where it came from and will allow you to trace even the smallest specimen of an explosive to its original source if it is not commonly made; and where it's commonly made, to narrow the source. It's a very good investigative technique.

There is good research being done into elements that would render certain kinds of explosives inert. Now that's much trickier, but if it--if it could be fruitful, would be very, very helpful.

Mr. ADELMAN: What does that mean?

Ms. GORELICK: Meaning that if you took something like fertilizer--I don't know that this will bear fruit, but if you took something like a type of fertilizer that has a useful domestic purpose but also a pernicious one and could render it so that it could not have the pernicious use, that would be very helpful.

Also, detection devices. We are looking right now at devices which you can put up against the side of a truck, for example, and detect narcotics, people, various kinds of explosive elements. Those are the things that we are looking at and--as well as identification devices for guns and other arms--remote identification devices. And I think technology will play an important part of our efforts to attack terrorism.

I also would make one other point about technology. We need very much to keep up with the technology of the terrorists. And one of the things that we sought in the terrorism bill was so-called multipoint wiretaps. Right now, if we get a wiretap on a phone number, if you switch phones, we have to go back into court and get another wiretap order. Now the Fourth Amendment, in my view, protects people, not places. We ought to be able to follow you. With the new technology for cellular phones, at a push of a button, you can switch from a telephone number in one area code to a telephone number in another. And it makes very little sense to me that we should not be able to move with you as you move. So we have sought technological--we have sought legal changes to keep up with the technology of those that we are trying to keep track of. Mr. McCURDY: Very good. Ms. Gorelick, again, thank you very much...

Ms. GORELICK: My pleasure.

Mr. McCURDY: ...for taking your time. And on behalf of the Council on Foreign Relations and the panel, we certainly appreciate your involvement and your diligent efforts. I want to thank my colleagues as well, Ms. Strossen, Mr. Adelman, for their participation today. They've done an excellent job. And almost like the real thing in the Congress, you can see this is a fairly balanced panel. We have differing views. We have a breadth of ideology. But I think we all share one common concern, and that is the threat of terrorism and the potential to increase the level of violence is very real. And we believe that the work that you do is very important to that effort.

And the council, again, keeping with our charter, trying to inform and enlighten the public on these issues in a very balanced way, I think, has been met today. And again, we appreciate it very much. And with that, Mr. President, Mr. Gelb, do you have any concluding comments? If not, then we stand adjourned. Thank you.

Ms. GORELICK: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the panel.