Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 18, 2008|Volume 36, Number 26

In his Heyman Lecture on Public Service at the Law School, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff discussed the dangers of such terrorist groups as al Qaeda, Hezbollah and FARC.

Terrorism still a grave concern for the U.S., says Homeland Security secretary

To those who question whether U.S. officials’ discussions of terrorist threats are no more than “fear mongering,” Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff offered this piece of advice: Read the current and upcoming newspaper accounts of the trial involving eight men charged with plotting to blow up transatlantic flights out of London.

Chertoff, who delivered the Law School’s 2007-2008 Heyman Lecture on Public Service on April 7, noted that the alleged terrorists are being prosecuted for a scheme to kill innocent people in the most “horrific” way possible. According to the prosecution, they planned to bomb one plane first, allowing news about the terrorist act to reach passengers who were then high above the ocean on other transatlantic flights. The passengers — some of them parents traveling on summer vacations with their children, Chertoff noted — would have suffered extreme “mental torture” as they considered their own fate.

Chertoff’s talk, titled “Confronting the Threats to Our Homeland,” examined both natural and man-made threats to American public safety. He focused much of his talk on the threat of terrorism, which he contended was one of the biggest security concerns of the 21st century.

“It’s not that terrorism never existed before, but the scale, the dimension, the ideological foundation of terrorism is different now than it was in the past century or prior centuries,” he told his audience. “One reason that is true is that the leverage modern technology gives to the small group of terrorists or the single terrorist is beyond the leverage a terrorist had 100 or 200 years ago. Whereas 100 or 200 years ago we talked about a bomb killing a small number of people, we now have capabilities in science and technology that raise the very realistic possibility that a small group of terrorists could kill not only thousands of people — as one group did on Sept. 11 — but hundreds of thousands of people. And that has changed the dimension of the threat we face.”

During the Cold War, Chertoff noted, the United States and the Soviet Union maintained a relative stability through the “power of deterrence.”

“If we faced a threat and our ability to respond to it was equal to or greater, we could protect that threat from coming to pass,” Chertoff explained. Globalization and the growth of Islamic radicalism, he said, has ushered the world into a different kind of era.

Today’s most dangerous terrorist threats, Chertoff noted, come not from nation states but from organizations such as the militant Islamic group al Qaeda, which, he said, “seeks to find a host of states in which it can flourish” where it “would have the ability to proscribe a rule of law that would be intolerant of other views and which would subordinate the right of the individual to the right of the ideological.” The main targets of its attacks, Chertoff maintained, are the democratic countries of the West.

Although the al Qaeda network was mostly destroyed in Afghanistan, it continues its training and planning for attacks in remote sections of Pakistan, in Maghreb in North Africa and in Somalia, Chertoff said.

In Somalia, al Qaeda’s objective is to take a state that is “very unstable and turn it into a platform for further attacks or for development and planning,” he said.

“Should it take root in Somalia in the way it has taken root in the frontier areas of Pakistan or in Maghreb, we’d find ourselves facing this ideology married with increased capability and a platform to launch against the West,” Chertoff told his audience.

Chertoff noted, however, that in parts of the Middle East and beyond, there is a growing “revulsion” toward al Qaeda (and its allies) because of the suicide bombings that have killed thousands of innocent people. Increasing numbers of Muslims, he said, are “rejecting this hijacking of religion by people who are seeking to use ideology to promote their own purposes.”

“What this has called forth among clerics and other Muslim leaders in the Middle East is the beginning of a dialogue in which the theory of violence is being explicitly rejected, and [al Qaeda’s] potential recruits are beginning to learn that those who would recruit them to violence are taking them down a false path,” Chertoff said.

Furthermore, he said, comments made by al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the past six months, in which he has tried to justify the killing of innocent people, demonstrate “the first crack in the façade of self-confidence which has been the hallmark of al Qaeda leaders.

“This doesn’t mean the threat is over,” he continued. “It means it’s not insurmountable. It need not be with us forever. If we continue to maintain our resolution in our short-term tactical defense against terrorism but also in fostering a more long-term struggle for hearts and minds, we can see a day in which al Qaeda will be actually rejected by the vast majority of people to whom it seeks to appeal.”

Chertoff contended, however, that there are other terrorist threats to national security that are potentially more dangerous than al Qaeda. He named Hezbollah — the Lebanon-based Shi’a Islamic organization — as a chief concern.

“Hezbollah is a well-disciplined paramilitary force with capabilities about which al Qaeda can only dream, including missiles, very sophisticated explosives and very sophisticated operatives who are capable of functioning around the world,” he said.

“ … It is a vision of what an ideologically militant terrorist organization can become when it finally evolves to literally become an army and a political party, and gains embedded control in a state.”

In addition to engaging in war with Israel, Hezbollah has “expanded its tentacles” to areas outside of the Middle East, including South America. There, he said, the organization could become an even bigger threat if it converges with such militant groups as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), which engages in kidnapping and drug trafficking to raise money for its cause. The U.S. State Department has identified FARC as a terrorist organization, Chertoff noted.

Another concern, according to Chertoff, is the rise of the gang called Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), which began as an immigrant street gang in Los Angeles but has grown to become a network of up to 10,000 members in Central America. The FBI has claimed that this transnational criminal organization operates in 42 of the United States’ 50 states.

“It can disrupt governmental structures and has the potential to be a threat,” Chertoff told his audience. “The convergence of this type of organization with an ideological one gives us pause.”

While modern technological advances have increased the dangers of terrorist threats, Chertoff said, these same systems can be employed in the fight against terrorism. For example, he noted, the government can easily collect information about people and can use biometrics to identify them as a way of securing travel. Other measures to thwart terrorism include giving people in unstable countries a voice “in the battlefield of ideas” and providing foreign aid, he said.

“When we go into Africa and fight against malaria or HIV/AIDS, we’re actually striking a positive blow for the kind of ideology we believe in the West, an ideology that promotes tolerance and values human life and human freedom.”

Chertoff concluded by saying that those who have come to regard the terrorism associated with Sept. 11 as a “one-time artifact” are mistaken.

“Sometimes the things we’re afraid of are unpleasant to talk about,” he said. “Sometimes what we need to do to address those fears are difficult and challenging. It’s fair to debate the right way to address these problems, but it doesn’t make sense to close your eyes to them because they are too hard to think about. Only through a robust discussion of what the challenges are can we address them.”

— By Susan Gonzalez

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