Such warnings are hardly new in our post-9-11 world. In the last 21 months, the government has investigated more than 3,000 terrorist threats in the United States, issued 103 warnings to law enforcement agencies and announced three major nationwide terrorist alerts before this one. But this time, intelligence officials say they have intercepted more specific detail about potential attacks and have more reason to believe one is “imminent.”
Should the government be doing more to protect us? And is there anything we can do to prevent an attack? Gavin de Becker, author of “Fear Less: Real Truth About Risk, Safety, and Security in a Time of Terrorism” (Little Brown) is a security consultant whose clients have included the CIA and the U.S. Supreme Court. He spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Jennifer Barrett about his view that the government has its own agenda for raising its risk alert–and what ordinary people can do to help prevent attacks. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: How effective is the government’s color-coded alert system in preparing for–or helping to prevent–another terrorist attack?
Gavin de Becker: The alert system is political in nature. It is viewed by virtually all serious professionals in the field of security and threat assessment with disdain.
Why is that?
Americans have never once been told what to do with that information. It’s like your doctor saying, “Something’s wrong, but I’m not going to tell you what–or what to do about it–only that you are in big trouble.” The administration needed a way to appear to be providing information without actually providing any information.
What about the government’s recommendation this week that Americans should stock their homes with three days’ worth of water and food, and tape their windows with plastic and duct tape in case of a chemical or biological attack. Is that kind of information helpful or even necessary?
That warning regarding tape and three days of water is profoundly helpful to people who are choosing to go to war with Iraq and need to cause an environment of fear in order that the public will do anything to break the fear fever. It serves the administration for the public to be so afraid. When you are afraid enough, you’ll get on any train that’s leaving the station, even if it is not going where you want to go. That sentence says it all.
How so?
The flimsiness of the reason to go to war with Iraq requires that we be distracted. The evidence against Iraq is scant. Imagine a community in fear of a serial killer on the loose. Now imagine the government’s solution was to get a lynch mob together and go beat up or lynch a local burglar. It might feel like we’re doing something, but it wouldn’t be anything relevant. Our going to war with Iraq is not directly related to terrorism except in the profound sense that it would encourage more terrorism. People are saying, we have to do something–we can’t live like this. I say we have to stop terrorizing the public. Instead, we are going to drop a lot of bombs on people in Iraq.
Are we blowing the risks of a terrorist attack out of proportion?
To put it in brief context, in the two years since September 11, twice as many women in America have been killed by their husbands or boyfriends than were killed by the September 11 attacks, and yet all the funding for that [domestic-violence prevention] is drying up. We are now like a man in the gallery with a flashlight. We only focus on where we put the light. Americans lived for most of our lives with the illusion of complete safety from foreigners. That illusion was shattered on September 11. But the administration has replaced it with another illusion of complete vulnerability and powerlessness. That too has to be shattered.
But we are vulnerable. That was proven on September 11.
People say we have to do something about terrorism because people will die. Listen, folks, 3 million Americans will die this year [from other causes]. But we are focused on a bogeyman in a foreign country–Saddam–who has not done a single thing against us in more than a decade. Fear itself causes more death and suffering than all the terrorists in the world through addiction, stress-related disorders, heart disease, hypertension and suicide.
So the terror warnings don’t reflect the risk of an actual attack–or the casualties that such an attack might produce?
Our government has said to us at different points that there could be planes flying into nuclear power plants, millions killed in biological warfare, dirty bombs. Imagine if the government had said earlier that anthrax would be sent through the mail, a few would be killed, and that more would be killed by bee stings during the same period. No one would believe it. But that’s exactly what happened.
Six months after September 11, there’d been five major warnings of terrorism “any day now,” or “within the week” and even, “today.” Not one single major terrorist incident has followed these warnings, and the only thing close–the explosive shoe on the American Airlines flight–was during a period of no warning and was resolved completely by regular citizens. The five-color system allows the government to always say, “Well, we warned you.”
Is there more that the average person could be doing to prevent another attack–or protect themselves from the possibility?
A lot of people think only government can detect and prevent terrorism. In fact, that is precisely untrue. The government can protect and prevent terrorist acts only when regular citizens make reports of information. Before [any] courageous FBI raids and the arrests and the news conference, there is a regular American citizen who sees something suspicious, listens to his intuition and has the character to risk being wrong or appearing foolish when making a call to authorities. Conspiratorial planning and preparation [for terrorist attacks] does not occur in view of FBI agents, but in the view of regular citizens. For every one enforcement officer on the front line, there can be 100 citizens providing information if they understand enough about how a conspiracy works to know what to report.
I know you explore this in detail in “Fear Less,” but could you give our readers a brief summary of what to look for?
Imagine three men rent the apartment upstairs and are always looking through binoculars at the nearby federal building. It could be nothing, but you feel suspicious. This is the point at which many observers assume they need to see more evidence in support of their suspicion. But here’s the reality: that may be all you get–just a line of dialogue, not the whole play. The nature of conspiracy is that the elements of planning and logistics happen out of view of each other. You see one element. Nobody shows up at the electronics store and asks for the bomb department, but you might encounter someone who asks for several bomb components in a row–a timer, mercury switch, wire, battery and so on. Your suspicion has to be enough, because if you wait to put what you’ve seen together with some decisive fact, such as the man buying explosives across town on the same day, you’ll miss the opportunity intuition is telling you about.
Could a phone call to the police have prevented the September 11 attacks?
A librarian we interviewed in Delray [Beach], Fla., spent time with three of the [September 11] hijackers, and they never let her see what they were doing online. She remembers them because their behavior stood out as unusual. The people in their apartment building saw that they had no regular phones, only cell phones, and no furniture, but sometimes arrived in a limousine. You don’t have to build the entire criminal conspiracy case. You need only honor what you feel, observe what you can, document information and make the call.
Isn’t there a risk then that law enforcement would be inundated with tens of thousands of calls that might turn out to be nothing?
All governments on earth want you to believe that only they can protect you. What makes our government–not the administration, but our government–different is that our government is us in the United States. Just as we need its help, it needs our help. Working together is the only way.
