By Tom Flanigan
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wfsu/local-wfsu-884797.mp3
Tallahassee, FL – During his eighteen years as a U-S Senator from Florida, Bob Graham became an international intelligence expert. This week, he shared some of those insights with a Tallahassee audience, and there was not much positive news.
More than half of Graham's time in Washington was spent in the Senate Intelligence Committee. He chaired that committee around the time of the 9-11 attacks and headed a congressional commission on controlling weapons of mass destruction. All of that puts Graham in a uniquely qualified position to answer a simple question.
"The question is, are we safer? I'm afraid the answer is no."
Graham was addressing a standing-room only audience at the Claude Pepper Center on the Florida State campus Tuesday. He says there are good reasons for his pessimistic assessment of the nation's readiness to deal with terrorist attacks.
"We're not competing in a static environment. Our adversaries have been running faster than we have and therefore, even though we are moving, we're still losing ground."
For one thing, Graham notes that Al-Qaeda, which was a very centralized, top-down organization in the time of 9-11, has adopted a different business model.
"Today, Al-Qaeda has become a franchise, a Burger King, a McDonald's, and we're seeing it recently in the growth of one of those franchises, which is Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. That is typical of some sixty regional affiliates of Al-Qaeda."
Graham says that makes it far tougher to track and predict Al-Qaeda activities. It's not just those relatively small bands of terrorists that have Graham concerned. He says certain countries need to be watched closely.
"Five years ago, Pakistan had approximately twenty nuclear weapons. Today, it has between forty and fifty, and it is on a trajectory to have a hundred."
Pakistan has terrible relations with its much larger nuclear neighbor, India, which Graham notes has just signed a deal to get more atomic technology from the U-S. That could make an already unstable and paranoid Pakistan less likely to help America in its war against terror. Plus, there are other not-so-friendly countries itching for the bomb.
"In the Middle East, if Iran goes nuclear, it's going to be very difficult to avoid Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey having aspirations. And in the Northeast Asian region, if North Korea continues to expand its capabilities, South Korea and Japan become prospects to join the nuclear weapons club."
As a result of this, Graham and his congressional commission colleagues came up with a scary prediction.
"It is more likely than not, better than a fifty-fifty chance, that there will be a weapon of mass destruction used someplace on Earth by a terrorist group between now and the end of 2013."
The most likely weapon is probably biological, with Anthrax spores being a good candidate, and a place like Pakistan being the launching point. Here in the U-S, such an attack would certainly ramp up the Department of Homeland Security threat level from the current "orange" to "red." That led Graham to ask the audience, "Does anybody know what that means? Would you do anything different because we were at a red alert, than you're doing at an orange alert? No! I don't believe anybody has any idea of what that means to us personally. I mean, should we keep our kids home from school? Should we go to Liberty County and find a pine tree and stay under it?"
A streamlined, more effective homeland security effort is on Graham's wish list, along with better interagency communication. But he believes the very best defenses against terrorism are Americans themselves.
"I'm not advocating a system where everybody spies on their neighbor. But I do think we need to have a system where the citizens are enlightened as to what they can do."
That is similar to what's being done in places like the United Kingdom and Israel. Graham is hopeful the same can happen here.
"I think, like most times in American history, when things have gotten seriously out of balance, it's been the people who have risen up."