Post by RPankn on Jan 11, 2006 2:28:26 GMT -5
I found this posted at the Rigorous Intuition Board. This is a Harvard group convened in 1998 to deal with the police state that would be constructed after, like the group's name says, a catastrophic terrorist attack.
Here are the three co-authors of the report:
Ashton B. Carter, John M. Deutch and Philip D. Zelikow
About the Authors
The Honorable Ashton B. Carter
Ash Carter is Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Co-Director, with William J. Perry, of the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project.
From 1993-1996 Carter served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, where he was responsible for national security policy concerning the states of the former Soviet Union (including their nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction), arms control, countering proliferation worldwide, and oversight of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and missile defense programs; he also chaired NATO’s High Level Group. He was twice awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award given by the Pentagon. Carter continues to serve DOD as an adviser to the Secretary of Defense and as a member of both DOD’s Defense Policy Board and Defense Science Board, and DOD’s Threat Reduction Advisory Council.
Before his government service, Carter was director of the Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and chairman of the editorial board of International Security. Carter received bachelor’s degrees in physics and in medieval history from Yale University and a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
In addition to authoring numerous scientific publications and government studies, Carter was an author and editor of a number of books, most recently Preventive Defense: An American Security Strategy for the 21st Century (with William J. Perry). Carter’s current research focuses on the Preventive Defense Project, which designs and promotes security policies aimed at preventing the emergence of major new threats to the United States.
Carter is a Senior Partner of Global Technology Partners, LLC, and a member of the Advisory Board of MIT Lincoln Laboratories, the Draper Laboratory Corporation, and the Board of Directors of Mitretek Systems, Inc. He is a consultant to Goldman Sachs and the MITRE Corporation on international affairs and technology matters, a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Honorable John M. Deutch
Dr. John Deutch has served in significant government and academic posts throughout his career. In May 1995, he was sworn in as Director of Central Intelligence following a unanimous vote in the Senate, and he served as DCI until December 1996. In this position, he was head of the Intelligence Community (all foreign intelligence agencies of the United States) and directed the Central Intelligence Agency. From March 1994 to May 1995, he served as the Deputy Secretary of Defense. From March 1993 to March 1994, Dr. Deutch served as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Technology. From 1977 to 1980, Dr. Deutch served in a number of positions for the U.S. Department of Energy: Director of Energy Research, Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Technology, and Undersecretary of the Department.
Dr. Deutch has served on many commissions during several presidential administrations, and he has received fellowships and honors from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1978), Alfred P. Sloan (Research Fellow 1967-69), and John Simon Guggenheim (Memorial Fellow 1974-1975). Public Service Medals have been awarded him from the Department of Energy (1980), the Department of State (1980), the Department of Defense (1994), the Department of the Army (1995), the Department of the Navy (1995), the Department of the Air Force (1995), and the Coast Guard (1995). He also received the Central Intelligence Distinguished Intelligence Medal (1996) and the Intelligence Community Distinguished Intelligence Medal (1996).
Dr. Deutch has been a member of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1970 to present, where he has served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry, Dean of Science and Provost. Currently, Dr. Deutch is an MIT Institute Professor.
Dr. Deutch earned a BA in history and economics from Amherst College, and both a BS in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from MIT. He holds honorary degrees from Amherst College, University of Lowell and Northeastern University. Dr. Deutch serves as director for the following publicly held companies: Ariad Pharmaceutical, Citicorp, CMS Energy, Cummins, Raytheon, and Schlumberger Ltd.
Philip D. Zelikow
Philip Zelikow is Director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has taught at Harvard University, and he served as a career diplomat in the Department of State and on the staff of the National Security Council.
His books include The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (with Ernest May, Harvard UP), Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (with Condoleezza Rice, Harvard UP), and the forthcoming rewritten edition of Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (with Graham Allison, Longman). He has also written a study of intelligence policy for the Twentieth Century Fund, published as In From the Cold.
A member of the Department of State’s Historical Advisory Committee, a former consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and a participant in Harvard’s Intelligence and Policy Project, Zelikow is also the deputy director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a program of the Aspen Institute. He holds a doctorate from the Fletcher School and a law degree from the University of Houston.
One of Clinton's CIA directors and the Republican chair of the Sept. 11th omission commission. Also, note the names of the people who served on this group:
The authors would like to thank the members of the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group:
Graham T. Allison, Jr.
Zoe Baird
Vic DeMarines
Robert Gates
Jamie Gorelick
Robert Hermann
Philip Heyman
Fred Ikle
Elaine Kamarck
Ernest May
Matthew Meselson
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
William J. Perry
Larry Potts
Fred Schauer
J. Terry Scott
Jack Sheehan
Malcom Sparrow
Herbert Winokur
Robert Zoellick
Here's their blueprint for the post-Sept. 11th police state:
Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy
Imagining the Transforming Event
<snip>
Experts combining experience in every quadrant of the national security and law enforcement community all consider this catastrophic threat perfectly plausible today. Technology is more accessible, society is more vulnerable, and much more elaborate international networks have developed among organized criminals, drug traffickers, arms dealers, and money launderers: the necessary infrastructure for catastrophic terrorism. Practically unchallengeable American military superiority on the conventional battlefield pushes this country’s enemies toward the unconventional alternatives.2
Readers should imagine the possibilities for themselves, because the most serious constraint on current policy is lack of imagination. An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great "success" or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a "before" and "after." The effort and resources we devote to averting or containing this threat now, in the "before" period, will seem woeful, even pathetic, when compared to what will happen "after." Our leaders will be judged negligent for not addressing catastrophic terrorism more urgently.
Using imagination, we hope now to find some of the political will that we know would be there later, "after," because this nation prefers prevention to funereal reconstruction. When this threat becomes clear the President must be in a position to activate extraordinary capabilities. The danger of the use of a weapon of mass destruction against the United States or one of its allies is greater at this moment than it was during the Cold War, or at least since 1962. The threat of catastrophic terrorism is therefore a priority national security problem, as well as a major law enforcement concern. The threat thus deserves the kind of attention we now devote to threats of military nuclear attack or of regional aggression, as in the Defense Department’s major regional contingencies that drive our force planning and the resources we devote to defense.
<snip>
We formed a Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group to move beyond a realization of the threat to consider just what can be done about it. This group began meeting in November 1997. We examined other studies that consider this problem. We received information and advice from some current government officials as well as from those who had considered the problem from the perspectives of governments in Great Britain, Israel, Germany, and Russia. We now advance practical proposals for consideration and debate. We avoid a grand solution, preferring to shape "bricks" that strengthen existing structures, consider the very different technical challenges presented by nuclear, biological, chemical, and cyber threats, and provide a foundation for future adaptation and future building.
Organizing for Success
<snip>
The greatest danger may arise if the threat falls into one of the crevasses in our government’s field of overlapping jurisdictions, such as the divide between terrorism that is "foreign" or "domestic;" or terrorism that has "state" or "non-state" sponsors; or terrorism that is classified as a problem for "law enforcement" or one of "national security." The law enforcement/national security divide is especially significant, carved deeply into the topography of American government.
The national security paradigm fosters aggressive, proactive intelligence gathering, presuming the threat before it arises, planning preventive action against suspected targets, and taking anticipatory action. The law enforcement paradigm fosters reactions to information voluntarily provided, post-facto arrests, trials governed by rules of evidence, and general protection for the rights of citizens.
<snip>
Intelligence and Warning
The U.S. government should seek to have the legal authorities and the capability to monitor—physically and electronically—any group and their potential state sponsors that might justifiably be considered to have a motive and capability to use weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. government should be able to do all that can reasonably be done to detect any use or deployment of such weapons anywhere in the world, by utilizing remote sensing technology and by strengthening and evaluating worldwide sources of information. These would include clandestine collection, open sources such as foreign newspapers and journals or the Internet, and would include better-organized exchanges with key allies and other like-minded states.
<snip>
Today the U.S. intelligence community lacks a place to perform "all-source" planning for collecting information, where the possible yields from efforts in overhead reconnaissance, electronic surveillance, clandestine agents, law enforcement databases and informants, and reports from foreign governments, can be sifted and organized for maximum complementary effect. The national security agencies can be proactive. Domestic law enforcement officials understandably are not proactive about intelligence collection but focus their efforts from informants or other collection to investigate suspected criminal actions with the objective of criminal prosecution. Civil liberties properly discourage them from going out and looking for criminals before they have evidence of crime.
On the other hand, domestic law enforcement has many techniques for gathering data, including lawful wiretaps and grand jury investigations. Much of the yield from these efforts is, in turn, closed off to the national security community by law or regulation, to safeguard constitutional rights.8
We believe the U.S. needs a new institution to gather intelligence on terrorism, with particular attention to the threat of catastrophic terrorism. We call this new institution a National Terrorism Intelligence Center. This Center would be responsible for collection management, analysis, dissemination of information, and warning of suspected catastrophic terrorist acts. The Center would need the statutory authority to:
· monitor and provide warning of terrorist threats to relevant agencies of the U.S. government, supporting defense or intelligence operations, as well as law enforcement;
· set integrated collection requirements for gathering information for all the intelligence agencies or bureaus of the U.S. government;
· receive and store all lawfully collected, relevant information from any government agency, including law enforcement wiretaps and grand jury information;
· analyze all forms of relevant information to produce integrated reports that could be disseminated to any agency that needed them, while restricting dissemination of underlying domestic wiretap and grand jury information;
· review planned collection and intelligence programs of all agencies directed toward terrorist targets to determine the adequacy and balance among these efforts in preparation of the President’s proposed budget;
· facilitate international cooperation in counterterrorism intelligence, including the bilateral efforts of individual agencies;
· not manage operational activities or take on the task of general intelligence about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (now coordinated in the Director of Central Intelligence Nonproliferation Center);
· be exempt from motions for pretrial discovery in the trials of indicted criminals.9
Since this Center would have constant access to considerable domestic law enforcement information, we believe it should not be located at the Central Intelligence Agency. The highly successful Director of Central Intelligence Counterterrorism Center established in the mid-1980s has a narrower mandate than the National Center that we propose and it would be incorporated into the new National Center. Instead we recommend the National Center be located in the FBI. However, the Center, in our conception, would be responsible to an operating committee, chaired by the Director of Central Intelligence and including the Director of the FBI, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Attorney General, the Deputy Secretary of State, and the Deputy National Security Adviser. The budget would be included within the National Foreign Intelligence Program, which already provides support for the FBI’s National Security Division. Unresolved disputes would go to the National Security Council. The director of the Center would come alternately from FBI and CIA. The major intelligence organizations would all be required to provide a specified number of professionals to the Center, and this number would be exempt from agency personnel ceilings.
Prevention and Deterrence
<snip>
We are concerned about the actions of governments, too. Over time, we hope the burden of proof in demonstrating compliance with international conventions must also shift away from those alleging noncompliance to those states or groups whose compliance is in doubt. International norms should adapt so that such states are obliged to reassure those who are worried and to take reasonable measures to prove they are not secretly developing weapons of mass destruction. Failure to supply such proof, or prosecute the criminals living in their borders, should entitle worried nations to take all necessary actions for their self-defense.
<snip>
Analysis, for instance, shows that international border crossings are an important bottleneck in the worldwide movement of criminals. The United States, rather than just looking after the verifiability of its own passports, should organize resources focused on such bottlenecks throughout the world. We can imagine, for instance, a system created, with American funding, to insure that every country’s passports are computer readable, that every passport control officer has such a reader, and that every reader is linked to a database that can validate the status of the document, or indicate the need for further inquiries. The database need not invade the internal files of any government. As is already the case in the private sector, third entities can be created to perform the clearinghouse role, using data supplied by participating governments. Naturally, terrorists could still use documents of non-participating countries, but those would attract just the suspicion such travelers seek to avoid.
Government agencies can do many things reasonably well, but strategic risk analysis is not one of them. We recommend establishing a center for catastrophic terrorism risk analysis, offering a substantial multi-year contract, executed by the FBI, to a not-for-profit research center to perform this sort of analysis, devise and evaluate exercises and tests, and develop concepts of operations for countering catastrophic terrorism. Early in the nuclear era the RAND Corporation played an important part in helping the government think about a new set of security concerns. The Department of Defense has made a start by establishing an advanced concepts office in the newly formed Defense Threat Reduction Agency. But risk analysis will require a national, not just a DOD, focus.
<snip>
However, if some agency of the U.S. government learned that a large scale WMD attack might actually be imminent, threatening tens of thousands of lives, we expect that this structure for responding would almost instantly be pushed aside. The White House would immediately become involved and would seek to use every bit of power at America’s disposal in order to avert or contain the attack. The operational command structure would need to be capable of directing everything from CIA covert actions to strikes by bombers or missiles, be able to set up interdiction involving ground, sea, and air forces, and be able to mobilize and move thousands of soldiers (active duty, ready reserve, and National Guard) and thousands of tons of freight (in various emergency supplies and support for deployed units). Nor can any of these actions happen quickly unless plans have already been drawn up and units designated to carry them out, with repeated training and exercises to create a readiness to bring the plans to life. In this situation, the Defense Department’s capabilities would immediately become paramount. The FBI does not command such resources and does not plan to command them.
<snip>
Rather than create a new combatant command, we suggest instead two new offices, one set up within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the other created within the existing combatant command, U.S. Atlantic Command, that is already responsible for the security of the American homeland with operational responsibility for the majority of the U.S. armed forces. Our working titles for these offices are Catastrophic Terrorism Response Offices, or CTROs. The new offices would build a capability centered in the federal government but including state and local authorities along with relevant parts of the private sector to respond, once authorized to act by the President and the Secretary of Defense, to validated terrorist threats that would cause massive loss of life (measured in the thousands, i.e., significantly larger than the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City) or otherwise jeopardize the operation of American government or critical infrastructure necessary to public health or the functioning of the economy. Obviously, the President and his advisors would face a difficult judgment to determine when this threshold has been met, but such judgments are required in other areas of national security policy and they can be made here.
The CTROs would plan and organize for a U.S. response to catastrophic terrorism by all elements of the U.S. government.
They would:
· assess intelligence and warning information in order to alert the National Command Authority of catastrophic terrorist threats;
· set requirements for, among other things, the collection and analysis of intelligence carried out by the proposed National Counterterrorism Intelligence Center;
· define needed resources and assure that resources, procedures, and trained personnel are available at the federal, state, and local level to respond to validated catastrophic threats;
· sponsor training and exercises involving federal, state, and local authorities for responding to catastrophic terrorist attacks;
· task operations by other organizations once activated by the President through the Secretary of Defense (with actual operations being undertaken by line organizations, whether covert actions by the CIA or military operations through the Joint Chiefs of Staff or law enforcement actions by the FBI);
· coordinate international preparedness to join in a multinational response against catastrophic terrorist threats.
<snip>
Conclusion
Our group’s deliberations started from the premise that catastrophic terrorism poses a first-order threat to our nation’s future. We then asked, in effect: if we had a serious national policy to deal with this threat, what would our government be organized and able to do? In 1940 and 1941 the U.S. government imagined what kind of forces it would have in order to wage a global war. The answers were so far beyond existing reality that we can imagine all the wry smiles and shaking heads that must have been seen in Washington offices as the planning papers made their rounds. Similar cycles occurred in the Cold War. For example, the notion of an intelligence system founded on photographic surveillance from the upper atmosphere, or outer space, seemed outrageously far-fetched in 1954, when the U-2 program was born. The films and cameras alone seemed to be an overwhelming hurdle. A few years later the U-2s were flying; six years later satellites were doing the job. Similar stories can be told about the strange and remarkable history of intercontinental missile guidance or about how the U.S. and its allies developed the capability to move more than a half-million troops and thousands of armored fighting vehicles and their supporting infrastructure to the Persian Gulf within a few months, from both Europe and North America.
Our government can deal with new challenges. But first we must imagine success. Then we must organize ourselves to attain it.
www.ksg.harvard.edu/visions/publication/terrorism.htm#CATASTROPHIC%20TERRORISM:%20ELEMENTS%20OF%20A%20NATIONAL%20POLICY
Here are the three co-authors of the report:
Ashton B. Carter, John M. Deutch and Philip D. Zelikow
About the Authors
The Honorable Ashton B. Carter
Ash Carter is Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Co-Director, with William J. Perry, of the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project.
From 1993-1996 Carter served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, where he was responsible for national security policy concerning the states of the former Soviet Union (including their nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction), arms control, countering proliferation worldwide, and oversight of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and missile defense programs; he also chaired NATO’s High Level Group. He was twice awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award given by the Pentagon. Carter continues to serve DOD as an adviser to the Secretary of Defense and as a member of both DOD’s Defense Policy Board and Defense Science Board, and DOD’s Threat Reduction Advisory Council.
Before his government service, Carter was director of the Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and chairman of the editorial board of International Security. Carter received bachelor’s degrees in physics and in medieval history from Yale University and a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
In addition to authoring numerous scientific publications and government studies, Carter was an author and editor of a number of books, most recently Preventive Defense: An American Security Strategy for the 21st Century (with William J. Perry). Carter’s current research focuses on the Preventive Defense Project, which designs and promotes security policies aimed at preventing the emergence of major new threats to the United States.
Carter is a Senior Partner of Global Technology Partners, LLC, and a member of the Advisory Board of MIT Lincoln Laboratories, the Draper Laboratory Corporation, and the Board of Directors of Mitretek Systems, Inc. He is a consultant to Goldman Sachs and the MITRE Corporation on international affairs and technology matters, a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Honorable John M. Deutch
Dr. John Deutch has served in significant government and academic posts throughout his career. In May 1995, he was sworn in as Director of Central Intelligence following a unanimous vote in the Senate, and he served as DCI until December 1996. In this position, he was head of the Intelligence Community (all foreign intelligence agencies of the United States) and directed the Central Intelligence Agency. From March 1994 to May 1995, he served as the Deputy Secretary of Defense. From March 1993 to March 1994, Dr. Deutch served as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Technology. From 1977 to 1980, Dr. Deutch served in a number of positions for the U.S. Department of Energy: Director of Energy Research, Acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Technology, and Undersecretary of the Department.
Dr. Deutch has served on many commissions during several presidential administrations, and he has received fellowships and honors from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1978), Alfred P. Sloan (Research Fellow 1967-69), and John Simon Guggenheim (Memorial Fellow 1974-1975). Public Service Medals have been awarded him from the Department of Energy (1980), the Department of State (1980), the Department of Defense (1994), the Department of the Army (1995), the Department of the Navy (1995), the Department of the Air Force (1995), and the Coast Guard (1995). He also received the Central Intelligence Distinguished Intelligence Medal (1996) and the Intelligence Community Distinguished Intelligence Medal (1996).
Dr. Deutch has been a member of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1970 to present, where he has served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry, Dean of Science and Provost. Currently, Dr. Deutch is an MIT Institute Professor.
Dr. Deutch earned a BA in history and economics from Amherst College, and both a BS in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from MIT. He holds honorary degrees from Amherst College, University of Lowell and Northeastern University. Dr. Deutch serves as director for the following publicly held companies: Ariad Pharmaceutical, Citicorp, CMS Energy, Cummins, Raytheon, and Schlumberger Ltd.
Philip D. Zelikow
Philip Zelikow is Director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has taught at Harvard University, and he served as a career diplomat in the Department of State and on the staff of the National Security Council.
His books include The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (with Ernest May, Harvard UP), Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (with Condoleezza Rice, Harvard UP), and the forthcoming rewritten edition of Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (with Graham Allison, Longman). He has also written a study of intelligence policy for the Twentieth Century Fund, published as In From the Cold.
A member of the Department of State’s Historical Advisory Committee, a former consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and a participant in Harvard’s Intelligence and Policy Project, Zelikow is also the deputy director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a program of the Aspen Institute. He holds a doctorate from the Fletcher School and a law degree from the University of Houston.
One of Clinton's CIA directors and the Republican chair of the Sept. 11th omission commission. Also, note the names of the people who served on this group:
The authors would like to thank the members of the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group:
Graham T. Allison, Jr.
Zoe Baird
Vic DeMarines
Robert Gates
Jamie Gorelick
Robert Hermann
Philip Heyman
Fred Ikle
Elaine Kamarck
Ernest May
Matthew Meselson
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
William J. Perry
Larry Potts
Fred Schauer
J. Terry Scott
Jack Sheehan
Malcom Sparrow
Herbert Winokur
Robert Zoellick
Here's their blueprint for the post-Sept. 11th police state:
Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy
Imagining the Transforming Event
<snip>
Experts combining experience in every quadrant of the national security and law enforcement community all consider this catastrophic threat perfectly plausible today. Technology is more accessible, society is more vulnerable, and much more elaborate international networks have developed among organized criminals, drug traffickers, arms dealers, and money launderers: the necessary infrastructure for catastrophic terrorism. Practically unchallengeable American military superiority on the conventional battlefield pushes this country’s enemies toward the unconventional alternatives.2
Readers should imagine the possibilities for themselves, because the most serious constraint on current policy is lack of imagination. An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great "success" or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a "before" and "after." The effort and resources we devote to averting or containing this threat now, in the "before" period, will seem woeful, even pathetic, when compared to what will happen "after." Our leaders will be judged negligent for not addressing catastrophic terrorism more urgently.
Using imagination, we hope now to find some of the political will that we know would be there later, "after," because this nation prefers prevention to funereal reconstruction. When this threat becomes clear the President must be in a position to activate extraordinary capabilities. The danger of the use of a weapon of mass destruction against the United States or one of its allies is greater at this moment than it was during the Cold War, or at least since 1962. The threat of catastrophic terrorism is therefore a priority national security problem, as well as a major law enforcement concern. The threat thus deserves the kind of attention we now devote to threats of military nuclear attack or of regional aggression, as in the Defense Department’s major regional contingencies that drive our force planning and the resources we devote to defense.
<snip>
We formed a Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group to move beyond a realization of the threat to consider just what can be done about it. This group began meeting in November 1997. We examined other studies that consider this problem. We received information and advice from some current government officials as well as from those who had considered the problem from the perspectives of governments in Great Britain, Israel, Germany, and Russia. We now advance practical proposals for consideration and debate. We avoid a grand solution, preferring to shape "bricks" that strengthen existing structures, consider the very different technical challenges presented by nuclear, biological, chemical, and cyber threats, and provide a foundation for future adaptation and future building.
Organizing for Success
<snip>
The greatest danger may arise if the threat falls into one of the crevasses in our government’s field of overlapping jurisdictions, such as the divide between terrorism that is "foreign" or "domestic;" or terrorism that has "state" or "non-state" sponsors; or terrorism that is classified as a problem for "law enforcement" or one of "national security." The law enforcement/national security divide is especially significant, carved deeply into the topography of American government.
The national security paradigm fosters aggressive, proactive intelligence gathering, presuming the threat before it arises, planning preventive action against suspected targets, and taking anticipatory action. The law enforcement paradigm fosters reactions to information voluntarily provided, post-facto arrests, trials governed by rules of evidence, and general protection for the rights of citizens.
<snip>
Intelligence and Warning
The U.S. government should seek to have the legal authorities and the capability to monitor—physically and electronically—any group and their potential state sponsors that might justifiably be considered to have a motive and capability to use weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. government should be able to do all that can reasonably be done to detect any use or deployment of such weapons anywhere in the world, by utilizing remote sensing technology and by strengthening and evaluating worldwide sources of information. These would include clandestine collection, open sources such as foreign newspapers and journals or the Internet, and would include better-organized exchanges with key allies and other like-minded states.
<snip>
Today the U.S. intelligence community lacks a place to perform "all-source" planning for collecting information, where the possible yields from efforts in overhead reconnaissance, electronic surveillance, clandestine agents, law enforcement databases and informants, and reports from foreign governments, can be sifted and organized for maximum complementary effect. The national security agencies can be proactive. Domestic law enforcement officials understandably are not proactive about intelligence collection but focus their efforts from informants or other collection to investigate suspected criminal actions with the objective of criminal prosecution. Civil liberties properly discourage them from going out and looking for criminals before they have evidence of crime.
On the other hand, domestic law enforcement has many techniques for gathering data, including lawful wiretaps and grand jury investigations. Much of the yield from these efforts is, in turn, closed off to the national security community by law or regulation, to safeguard constitutional rights.8
We believe the U.S. needs a new institution to gather intelligence on terrorism, with particular attention to the threat of catastrophic terrorism. We call this new institution a National Terrorism Intelligence Center. This Center would be responsible for collection management, analysis, dissemination of information, and warning of suspected catastrophic terrorist acts. The Center would need the statutory authority to:
· monitor and provide warning of terrorist threats to relevant agencies of the U.S. government, supporting defense or intelligence operations, as well as law enforcement;
· set integrated collection requirements for gathering information for all the intelligence agencies or bureaus of the U.S. government;
· receive and store all lawfully collected, relevant information from any government agency, including law enforcement wiretaps and grand jury information;
· analyze all forms of relevant information to produce integrated reports that could be disseminated to any agency that needed them, while restricting dissemination of underlying domestic wiretap and grand jury information;
· review planned collection and intelligence programs of all agencies directed toward terrorist targets to determine the adequacy and balance among these efforts in preparation of the President’s proposed budget;
· facilitate international cooperation in counterterrorism intelligence, including the bilateral efforts of individual agencies;
· not manage operational activities or take on the task of general intelligence about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (now coordinated in the Director of Central Intelligence Nonproliferation Center);
· be exempt from motions for pretrial discovery in the trials of indicted criminals.9
Since this Center would have constant access to considerable domestic law enforcement information, we believe it should not be located at the Central Intelligence Agency. The highly successful Director of Central Intelligence Counterterrorism Center established in the mid-1980s has a narrower mandate than the National Center that we propose and it would be incorporated into the new National Center. Instead we recommend the National Center be located in the FBI. However, the Center, in our conception, would be responsible to an operating committee, chaired by the Director of Central Intelligence and including the Director of the FBI, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Attorney General, the Deputy Secretary of State, and the Deputy National Security Adviser. The budget would be included within the National Foreign Intelligence Program, which already provides support for the FBI’s National Security Division. Unresolved disputes would go to the National Security Council. The director of the Center would come alternately from FBI and CIA. The major intelligence organizations would all be required to provide a specified number of professionals to the Center, and this number would be exempt from agency personnel ceilings.
Prevention and Deterrence
<snip>
We are concerned about the actions of governments, too. Over time, we hope the burden of proof in demonstrating compliance with international conventions must also shift away from those alleging noncompliance to those states or groups whose compliance is in doubt. International norms should adapt so that such states are obliged to reassure those who are worried and to take reasonable measures to prove they are not secretly developing weapons of mass destruction. Failure to supply such proof, or prosecute the criminals living in their borders, should entitle worried nations to take all necessary actions for their self-defense.
<snip>
Analysis, for instance, shows that international border crossings are an important bottleneck in the worldwide movement of criminals. The United States, rather than just looking after the verifiability of its own passports, should organize resources focused on such bottlenecks throughout the world. We can imagine, for instance, a system created, with American funding, to insure that every country’s passports are computer readable, that every passport control officer has such a reader, and that every reader is linked to a database that can validate the status of the document, or indicate the need for further inquiries. The database need not invade the internal files of any government. As is already the case in the private sector, third entities can be created to perform the clearinghouse role, using data supplied by participating governments. Naturally, terrorists could still use documents of non-participating countries, but those would attract just the suspicion such travelers seek to avoid.
Government agencies can do many things reasonably well, but strategic risk analysis is not one of them. We recommend establishing a center for catastrophic terrorism risk analysis, offering a substantial multi-year contract, executed by the FBI, to a not-for-profit research center to perform this sort of analysis, devise and evaluate exercises and tests, and develop concepts of operations for countering catastrophic terrorism. Early in the nuclear era the RAND Corporation played an important part in helping the government think about a new set of security concerns. The Department of Defense has made a start by establishing an advanced concepts office in the newly formed Defense Threat Reduction Agency. But risk analysis will require a national, not just a DOD, focus.
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However, if some agency of the U.S. government learned that a large scale WMD attack might actually be imminent, threatening tens of thousands of lives, we expect that this structure for responding would almost instantly be pushed aside. The White House would immediately become involved and would seek to use every bit of power at America’s disposal in order to avert or contain the attack. The operational command structure would need to be capable of directing everything from CIA covert actions to strikes by bombers or missiles, be able to set up interdiction involving ground, sea, and air forces, and be able to mobilize and move thousands of soldiers (active duty, ready reserve, and National Guard) and thousands of tons of freight (in various emergency supplies and support for deployed units). Nor can any of these actions happen quickly unless plans have already been drawn up and units designated to carry them out, with repeated training and exercises to create a readiness to bring the plans to life. In this situation, the Defense Department’s capabilities would immediately become paramount. The FBI does not command such resources and does not plan to command them.
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Rather than create a new combatant command, we suggest instead two new offices, one set up within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the other created within the existing combatant command, U.S. Atlantic Command, that is already responsible for the security of the American homeland with operational responsibility for the majority of the U.S. armed forces. Our working titles for these offices are Catastrophic Terrorism Response Offices, or CTROs. The new offices would build a capability centered in the federal government but including state and local authorities along with relevant parts of the private sector to respond, once authorized to act by the President and the Secretary of Defense, to validated terrorist threats that would cause massive loss of life (measured in the thousands, i.e., significantly larger than the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City) or otherwise jeopardize the operation of American government or critical infrastructure necessary to public health or the functioning of the economy. Obviously, the President and his advisors would face a difficult judgment to determine when this threshold has been met, but such judgments are required in other areas of national security policy and they can be made here.
The CTROs would plan and organize for a U.S. response to catastrophic terrorism by all elements of the U.S. government.
They would:
· assess intelligence and warning information in order to alert the National Command Authority of catastrophic terrorist threats;
· set requirements for, among other things, the collection and analysis of intelligence carried out by the proposed National Counterterrorism Intelligence Center;
· define needed resources and assure that resources, procedures, and trained personnel are available at the federal, state, and local level to respond to validated catastrophic threats;
· sponsor training and exercises involving federal, state, and local authorities for responding to catastrophic terrorist attacks;
· task operations by other organizations once activated by the President through the Secretary of Defense (with actual operations being undertaken by line organizations, whether covert actions by the CIA or military operations through the Joint Chiefs of Staff or law enforcement actions by the FBI);
· coordinate international preparedness to join in a multinational response against catastrophic terrorist threats.
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Conclusion
Our group’s deliberations started from the premise that catastrophic terrorism poses a first-order threat to our nation’s future. We then asked, in effect: if we had a serious national policy to deal with this threat, what would our government be organized and able to do? In 1940 and 1941 the U.S. government imagined what kind of forces it would have in order to wage a global war. The answers were so far beyond existing reality that we can imagine all the wry smiles and shaking heads that must have been seen in Washington offices as the planning papers made their rounds. Similar cycles occurred in the Cold War. For example, the notion of an intelligence system founded on photographic surveillance from the upper atmosphere, or outer space, seemed outrageously far-fetched in 1954, when the U-2 program was born. The films and cameras alone seemed to be an overwhelming hurdle. A few years later the U-2s were flying; six years later satellites were doing the job. Similar stories can be told about the strange and remarkable history of intercontinental missile guidance or about how the U.S. and its allies developed the capability to move more than a half-million troops and thousands of armored fighting vehicles and their supporting infrastructure to the Persian Gulf within a few months, from both Europe and North America.
Our government can deal with new challenges. But first we must imagine success. Then we must organize ourselves to attain it.
www.ksg.harvard.edu/visions/publication/terrorism.htm#CATASTROPHIC%20TERRORISM:%20ELEMENTS%20OF%20A%20NATIONAL%20POLICY