DefenseWatch (sftt.org)
September 11, 2002

Countering The Weapons Of Our Enemy

By Ed Offley

It seemed to be the ending of one war, but it was actually the bare beginning of another when I walked out onto the flightline at Mombasa Airport one morning in December 1992. I had just finished a week of reporting on the multi-national "Operation Provide Relief" in Somalia, and had returned to the Kenyan seaport town with a small group of journalists and military escorts preparing for the long flight home.

A familiar silhouette caught my eye and I walked over to the Navy EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare aircraft parked in the sunshine, and found two Navy aviators conducting a pre-flight inspection. The four-seat, 60-foot-long Prowler was a familiar sight to me, since its only Navy home air station was in Washington state, where I then worked as a military reporter.

I introduced myself to the pilot and naval flight officer, then with a grin asked how the Navy was employing an electronic jamming aircraft against a failed country that had not had any measurable electricity in over a year (I had personally seen the ravaged former U.S. embassy in Mogadishu three days earlier, where looters had literally stripped the wiring out of the building to steal its copper).

The pilot, a young lieutenant, grinned back: "We’re adapting to the new threat environment," he said. "Climb up and look for yourself."

I mounted the ladder and looked in the aft cockpit where normally two electronics countermeasures officers would sit manipulating the aircraft’s sensitive receiving antennas and powerful jamming pods. Piled to the cockpit rim were bags of mail for the USS Kitty Hawk carrier battle group 100 miles offshore.

Neither the aviators, nor I, nor the Pentagon knew at that time that an obscure terrorist organization named al Qaeda was planning to send fighters to train Somali fighters in ambush tactics that they would use against Task Force Ranger in October 1993, an event that we now recognize as the first battle of the current war against terrorism.

Memories of that chance encounter came to mind this week as the U.S. news media began ramping up its planned saturation coverage of the events of 9/11/02 and the ongoing war against the new super-terrorists of the 21st century.

What occurred a year ago has been described in minute detail as a government-wide failure to anticipate the new threat that suicidal hijackers could achieve with several hundred thousand dollars, several years of careful planning, and the steely resolve to kill thousands of innocent civilians and themselves in an orchestrated series of attacks.

That much is as obvious as the gaping hole where the World Trade Center Towers once stood in lower Manhattan.

But remembering my encounter with the Prowler and its crew, I began to wonder: Have we – the U.S. intelligence community, the armed forces, the broad array of other federal agencies, and Americans in general – even begun to realign our sensors to pick up advance indications of the next attacks that al Qaeda is dedicated to carrying out against us?

One recurring stream of information in the media that has appeared this week is the reconstructed narrative of how the hijackers – particularly the four pilots – traveled from their home countries to Europe, then to Afghanistan, and back to the West as they refined and prepared their suicidal mission. The PBS program, Frontline re-aired on Monday a chilling story, "Inside the Terror Network," that focused on three of the terrorists, Mohammad Atta, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi – while The Washington Post on Tuesday published an updated profile of the pilot who attacked the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour.

In all four cases, there is a common pattern of events, where a seemingly "normal" young Muslim man – and all of them came from middle-class families in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates – came to the West for education but instead of flourishing in the free world, became alienated, self-isolated and consumed with a growing hatred of the environment in which they temporarily lived.

Some of the most poignant elements of the Frontline program concerned to comments of family relatives and friends of the young Lebanese student, Ziad Jarrah, brought back from the dead via family home videos to appear as a slender, shyly smiling young man dancing at the wedding of a cousin, and described by several acquaintances as a studious, intelligent person who wanted to study aircraft engineering and to become a pilot himself.

But Jarrah and the others do not merit our sorrow. They rushed willingly into the arms of the murderous Islamic ideology that has been spawned by Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants – an ideology that declares there can be no peace between Islam and non-Islam, and a belief structure that recognizes total violence against men, women and children, not for what they do, but for who we are. It was Jarrah, after all, the shy and gangly former student, who was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick and the other brave passengers rushed the cockpit in a counterattack that saved the U.S. Capitol at the cost of their own lives.

Ayman Muhammad al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s shadowy No. 2 official, was as clear as the Manhattan skyline a year ago today when he argued in a tract published last December the need to escalate the violence and severity of future terrorist attacks far beyond the level of 9/11:

"(1) The need to inflict the maximum casualties against the opponent, for this is the language understood by the West, no matter how much time and effort such operations take.

"(2) The need to concentrate on the method of martyrdom operations as the most successful way of inflicting damage against the opponent and the least costly to the mujahiddin in terms of casualties.

"(3) The targets as well as the type and method of weapons used must be chosen to have an impact on the structure of the enemy and deter it enough to stop its brutality, arrogance and disregard for all [Islamic] taboos and customs ….

Call it information warfare, call it psychiatric assessments, call it profiling, it is imperative that we mobilize all assets available to prevent such stealth terrorists from launching more attacks. To do that, we must first recognize that it is the ideology of al Qaeda that is the actual weapon that this terror network wields against us. The aircraft and GPS receivers and box cutters were merely a means to a deadly end.

First and foremost, we need to take the offensive in exposing the ideological flaws of al Qaeda’s ideology (as detailed in separate articles in this issue of DefenseWatch magazine by Robert G. Williscroft and Christian M. Weber).

Equally urgent, however, as the federal government continues to search inside the United States and in foreign countries for the hundreds of al Qaeda cells still in hiding, we urgently need to deploy a new system of sensitive receivers – like the antennas on that EA-6B relegated to mail duty – that can successfully locate, identify and track the other terrorists who are still out there.

Only then can we neutralize and defeat the enemy who still intends to kill us.

Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch.