Devil's Bargain

[jya@pipeline.com (John Young)]

   The New York Times, July 21, 1996, WIR, p. 5. 
 
 
   The Devil's Bargain of a Better World 
 
   By Tim Weiner 
 
 
   Washington. The arc of the burning plane falling into the 
   ocean, the fire glowing on the dark waters, shed light on 
   how vulnerable we are. When a jumbo jet falls from the sky, 
   technology has failed or terrorism has succeeded. 
 
   In the hours after Flight 800 went down off Fire Island, 
   everyone in officialdom said there was no reason to believe 
   it was a terrorist attack. Nearly everyone else 
   instinctively believed it was. 
 
   However the facts turn out, it is revealing that Americans 
   thought first of a bomb borne by angry men on a mission 
   from God. There was no more evidence to blame it on it was 
   close enough to truth, given the absence of facts, 
   Americans' shared fear of terror and their faith in 
   technology. 
 
   In any event, if the crash turns out to have been an 
   accident -- horrible but still an act of God -- the relief 
   may be fleeting. 
 
   "It doesn't matter whether it was a bomb or not, in the way 
   we think of it -- it's what we expect," said Ronald Steel, 
   professor of International relations at the University of 
   Southern California and author of "Temptations of a 
   Superpower" (Harvard, 1995). "We know it's going to happen 
   somewhere --if not this airplane, then the World Trade 
   Center, Lockerbie, the bombs in Saudi Arabia and Paris and 
   London. This is a part of our life. If for some reason this 
   wasn't a bomb, we better get ready for one tomorrow." [See 
   Steel's NYT Op-Ed today: http://jya.com/rsteel.txt.] 
 
   High-Tech Freedom 
 
   With the doubled-edge sword of technology, Americans have 
   carved a world of gleaming aircraft and guided missiles. 
   The airplanes that transport them, the cell phones and 
   television cables and computers that link them, define how 
   they live, how they work, how they take their pleasure. 
   They are right up there with freedom of speech and 
   religion, freedom from want and fear. They make America 
   rich, powerful, and free. 
 
   But Americans cannot control technology; increasingly, it 
   controls them. And when the people Americans fear get their 
   hands on it, the fear is accelerated and amplified by 500 
   channels of interwoven media hype. 
 
   The airlines and telephones and E-mail that connect 
   Americans connect those other people too: a computer disk 
   is the crucial piece of evidence in the current trial of 
   Ramzi Ahmed Yusef, accused of planning to blow a fleet of 
   commercial planes from the sky (and in a pending case, of 
   leading the World Trade Center bombing). 
 
   The subway rider poisoned in Tokyo and the American soldier 
   blown out of bed in Dhahran share a common knowledge: High 
   technology may make a fine sword, but it is a flawed 
   shield. It cannot stop every nut with a grudge. 
 
   Americans are slowly getting used to the idea that one can 
   no longer go through the world without passing through 
   security. They are learning to live with terror and the 
   technology of counter-terrorism, as people have for years 
   in Tel Aviv and Cairo, Belfast and Berlin, Karachi and 
   Algiers. They all visit those cities now; they enter them 
   every time they walk through a metal detector. 
 
   So life feels more and more like an international airport: 
   identity checkpoints and security zones in concrete and 
   glass buildings, pretty flowers planted in concrete 
   barricades outside, robot voices delivering warnings. 
 
   The fear means they arrive early to spend more down time 
   waiting in line to pass through security. So they adapt, 
   thinking: That's not a barricade, it's a flowerpot. They 
   give up a little freedom in exchange for feeling safe, "all 
   watched over," as the late poet Richard Brautigan wrote, 
   "by machines of loving grace." 
 
   Visitors 
 
   The people who hate, love, envy and fear America's 
   prosperity and power, also pass through that international 
   airport. The United States needs their oil for fuel; it 
   needs their sweat for work Americans don't do any more. 
   They are woven into America, traveling through open lines 
   of trade and telecommunications and technology. 
 
   So everybody learns to live with the fear of the bomb in 
   the cargo bay: you have to catch that plane if you have 
   business abroad. If the United States were determined to 
   buy machines that could sniff out the Semtex in the 
   boombox, it could have done it -- the cost is perhaps $2 
   billion, or slightly less than one Stealth nuclear bomber. 
   But that is not the war Washington prepared to fight after 
   Vietnam. Generals today want wars they are sure to win. 
 
   We -- the United States -- have the smart bombs, built with 
   the billions that bankrupted Moscow and made America Number 
   One. They -- the furious and the powerless -- have the dumb 
   bombs, made from fertilizer and fuel oil, ignited by rage 
   and religion. But the United States can't stop them all, 
   not with its ever-tightening laws, not with its trillion- 
   dollar military, not with its weapons and warheads. So the 
   thinking goes. 
 
   On the simplest level, terrorism works: it terrifies. It 
   can increase the technology of control and erode the edges 
   of the Constitution. That can fuel the fear of Big Brother, 
   make people paranoid -- and in turn promote the homegrown 
   madness that exploded last year in Oklahoma City. Terrorism 
   cannot destroy the United States, but it has the power to 
   wound, outrage, sadden and change it. 
 
   When Iranians took Americans hostage and controlled the 
   nation's politics from half a world away, when a suicide 
   bomber blew up 241 American soldiers in Beirut and drove 
   the Marines from Lebanon, when the World Trade Center 
   shook, when the Dhahran barracks went up in smoke, it 
   expressed a burning anger in the world, the anger of the 
   poor and the powerless and the God-mad and the stateless. 
 
   The Method 
 
   Through repetition, Americans are slowly coming to 
   recognize the method in this madness: These attacks are 
   meant as blows against the global dominance of American 
   culture, money, power and technology. 
 
   Mr. Steel says the United States' stature as the one 
   surviving superpower and the architect of the new world 
   order is the very thing that makes it a target. 
 
   "Terror," he says, "is the weapon that the powerless use 
   against the powerful. We don't have any conception of what 
   an ideologically threatening power we are to people who 
   have different beliefs. Globalization and modernization are 
   truly threatening to people. They're even threatening to 
   the working class in this country because they drive down 
   wages. The very faith in technology that we spread is 
   something that runs head-on into another faith based on 
   tradition, asceticism and authority. We're the alien 
   ideology now." 
 
   [End] 
 
---------- 
 
   The New York Times, July 21, 1996, p. 25. 
 
 
   Top F.B.I. Investigator Is Known for Bluntness 
 
   James K. Kallstrom the head of the Federal Bureau of 
   Investigation s New York City office, is a technical wizard 
   who has bugged, wiretapped and generally bedeviled 
   mobsters, terrorists and other criminals for more than two 
   decades. 
 
   The crash investigation is the first major, high-profile 
   investigation of Mr. Kallstrom's tenure of a year and a 
   half. Since Wednesday night, Mr. Kallstrom has spent most 
   of his time shuttling, in a Blackhawk military helicopter, 
   between the F.B.I. command center, at 26 Federal Plaza in 
   Lower Manhattan, and the crash site, where he has held two 
   press conferences a day with a top official of the National 
   Transportation Safety Board. 
 
   Mr. Kallstrom is known for a no-nonsense, blunt approach 
   with his colleagues. He also never passes up a chance to 
   express some strongly felt opinions, they say. Often, Mr. 
   Kallstrom has offered his long-held view that Congress is 
   not doing enough to help Federal law enforcement in its 
   fight against criminals who use new technologies, such as 
   the Internet. 
 
   Since the crash Wednesday night, Mr. Kallstrom has had a 
   strong suspicion that it was tied to a bomb or missile. 
   "You have a lot of things that look like terrorism," Mr. 
   Kallstrom said at a press conference Friday afternoon. "At 
   some point in time, we're going to reach critical mass and 
   then we're going to be prepared to say exactly what we 
   think it is." As late as last night, he said he had not 
   seen anything to make him change that opinion. But 
   publicly, at least, Mr. Kallstrom has been reluctant to 
   declare that the crash was caused by a bomb or missile 
   until physical evidence, enough to reach a "beyond a 
   reasonable doubt" threshold, is found. 
 
   By selecting Mr. Kallstrom as assistant director in charge 
   of the New York Office in February 1995, the F.B.I. 
   Director, Louis J. Freeh, chose one of the bureau's most 
   respected surveillance experts, a man whose techniques 
   played a critical role in the arrests of every major 
   organized crime leader and terrorist in New York in the 
   last 20 years, including those involved with the World 
   Trade Center bombing in 1993. 
 
   [End]