What are we to make of the seven alleged attackers whom federal agents rolled up in Miami: that they were terrorists in waiting? Or boastful mopes who couldn’t find the Sears Tower if they were standing in its lobby? After all, the deputy director of the FBI said, “This group was more aspirational than operational.” Is that damning with faint praise–or praising with faint damns?
Here’s one way to think about that. Travel back to the morning of April 17, 1995. Timothy McVeigh, a drifter with a grudge and a weakness for lap-dancing, clung to a dream more aspirational than operational. He rented a yellow Ryder truck in Junction City, Kan.
On April 18 he and Terry Nichols constructed a bomb of ammonium nitrate, fuel oil and other explosives.
On the morning of April 19, he parked the truck next to the sturdy federal building in Oklahoma City.
So in McVeigh’s case, the time elapsed from aspiration to operation was … two days.
If only the FBI had known about McVeigh when he was as ill-prepared to act as this Miami crew. The costs of dismissing a scheme as too amateurish, too outlandish, can be high.
So, for that matter, are the costs of arrogantly thinking we know how terror groups think. Millions of words have been written about U.S. intelligence shortcomings in the years before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But three of those words stand out from all the others in the 9/11 commission’s final verdict: Public officials succumbed to a “failure of imagination” that spanned multiple government agencies and two presidential administrations. The 10 commissioners said those officials missed at least nine opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities in Al Qaeda’s plot–each of which held the potential to disrupt it.
In the wake of Sept. 11, Congress, the White House and those agencies vowed reform. They vowed an intelligence strategy that would act with imagination and decisiveness.
Not that our disturbing opportunities for self-education stopped in 2001. If there’s anything we’ve learned from the recently alleged bombing plot in Toronto, or from the 2005 subway and bus bombings in London, or from the 2004 commuter train bombing in Madrid, it’s that homegrown plotters can be every bit as menacing as those waging jihad in Afghanistan, Iraq or Indonesia. Maybe more so, since they have the advantage of blending into their local communities as seamlessly as, well, people who live there.
Federal authorities say that ability to move without raising alarm helped the Miami group plot a campaign that was to begin with the bombing of the Sears Tower in Chicago.
This case could play out in court for years. We may be a long time deciding whether the same FBI that in 2001 fumbled clues to Sept. 11 did a superb job of connecting dangerous dots in 2006.
We do, though, know that in an age when terror groups have no failure of imagination, watchful waiting can be a perilous strategy for U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.
When should we take plotters seriously? The correct answer is not when their scheme succeeds, but rather when they break our laws.
The Miami defendants are accused of conspiring to provide support for foreign terrorists, conspiring to cause malicious destruction with explosives and conspiring to levy war on the U.S.
Serious charges. If the charges prove true in court, it will demonstrate anew that aspiration alone is reason to slap on the cuffs.
