Agencies urged to study, share data on previous terror attacks

What does the United States need to know and do to avert new terrorist strikes against American citizens on American soil?

To Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, much of the answer is to round up and detain hundreds of suspects without even releasing their names. Asked on November 27 to justify his actions, he declared: "We're removing suspected terrorists ... from our streets to prevent further terrorist attacks."

Yet many anti-terrorism experts argue that the Justice Department could be taking other, less controversial steps that might actually do as much or more to thwart terrorist plots. Many scholars, former government officials, and lawyers who've prosecuted terrorist suspects contend that Justice ought to be disseminating credible information it possesses about the Al Qaeda terrorists' mind-set and modus operandi to intelligence agencies and to so-called first responders--state and local law enforcement agencies.

Ashcroft, however, maintains that divulging very much information about terrorism and terrorists would be foolish. "When the United States is at war," he said, "I will not share valuable intelligence with our enemies."

But much of the information readily available about Osama bin Laden's terrorism network is neither new nor classified. Before Sept. 11, the government possessed a substantial amount of information about the meticulously organized Al Qaeda network and its elaborate plans for unleashing weapons of mass destruction in this country.

Since 1998, the government has had in its possession a 180-page terrorist training manual, Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, which was discovered in the London apartment of an Al Qaeda member. And since September 11, there have been reports in the London press that a 7,000-page how-to manual on chemical and biological terrorism, titled Encyclopedia of Jihad, has been found in CD-ROM form.

Michael Chertoff, the head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, twice referred to the Al Qaeda training manual when he testified on November 28 before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He called attention to the lesson on "Prisons and Detention Centers," which advises terrorists how to act when facing a trial.

Al Qaeda members are instructed to accuse government investigators of torture, remain in contact with "brothers outside prison," hide messages, and "make arrangements for the brother's defense with the attorney whether he was retained by the brother's family or court-appointed." Chertoff said, "Woe unto us if we don't learn from these lessons."

Additional facts about the jihad--the terrorists' so-called holy war against the West--publicly came to light from February to July of this year during the trials of terrorists responsible for the 1998 truck bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and of a would-be terrorist who had planned to use explosives to cause massive destruction during the millennium celebration.

If valuable information from those trials has been forwarded to federal counterterrorism officials, knowledgeable sources think that it may never have been put to enough use. "My worry," says a former federal terrorism prosecutor, "is that you have thousands of federal agents heaping sand on the sand heap. And no one is sitting down to really integrate it."

This year's trial testimony detailed how Al Qaeda members study intended targets. In Africa, terrorists posed as food-cart vendors in front of the targeted embassies in order to photograph them without arousing suspicions and to ascertain weaknesses in the buildings' security. According to University of Oklahoma professor Stephen Sloan, who has helped formulate counterterrorism policies for the military, terrorists in Northern Ireland have also used this method of surveillance.

But a former high-ranking New York police official says that his department was never warned that terrorists might use food carts to case a target. "The FBI, as far as I knew, did not do a post-mortem on the [embassy bombing] trial and what came out," he said. "And if they did, they certainly did not get the analysis out to the person on patrol who should have had it."

At trial, prosecutors presented a terrorist-drawn diagram demonstrating how to build truck bombs that aren't easily detected during a cursory search. The truck that was used to destroy the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania had a wood-and-iron false back that hid the explosives when its doors were open. A dashboard button was pushed to detonate the bomb.

Law enforcement authorities refuse to comment on whether this truck-bomb design is well-known among investigators. But Robert Heibel, a former FBI counter-terrorism chief, would say that, in general, "once the trial is over, the information is forgotten unless you have that intelligence continuity that picks up on this information and makes it part of the institutionalized memory."

Ahmed Ressam, the thwarted millennium bomber, testified this year that Al Qaeda trains its members to sabotage gas and electric plants, airports, railroads, large corporations, and conference hotels. It also tells them how to block the roads leading away from an explosion site. Ressam said he had planned to detonate explosives in a truck loaded with gasoline and that other Al Qaeda cells were plotting similar attacks.

The information gleaned from the terrorism trials dovetails with that contained in the 180-page terrorism manual. "What the manuals show you is a snapshot of how [Al Qaeda members] are training and preparing," says Richard Schultz, the director of international security studies at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Chapters reveal gruesome details about what the manual calls "creative, innovative methods aimed at planting anti-personnel and anti-vehicle explosive charges" inside planes, radio equipment, televisions, radios, alarm clocks, shoes, or even within a bed. It adds: "Explosives are believed to be the safest weapon for the [terrorists].... It doesn't leave any evidence or traces at the operation site. In addition, explosives strike at the enemy with sheer terror and fright."

The manual also instructs Al Qaeda members on how to produce poisons from readily available materials. For example, dimethyl sulfoxide, which is used as a topical analgesic by veterinarians, can be mixed with herbal poisons such as ricin, which is obtained from castor beans. And terrorists are told how to target intelligence agents and VIPs, and even how to place poisons on doorknobs.

"It's quite sophisticated on its instruction of counter-surveillance," says Ruth Wedgwood, a leading national security expert who reviewed the jihad manual at the request of National Journal. For example, the manual exhaustively describes methods to avoid detection. It advises renting ground-floor apartments--ones easy to flee--in new communities, and mailing letters from a post office far from the sender's usual location. The letters should be sent, the manual instructs, not to the intended recipient but to a third party who will forward it.

Most dramatically, the manual gives insight into the ideal Al Qaeda recruit. The 10th chapter, "Special Tactical Operations," says that the operative should possess an emotional makeup "that allows coping with psychological traumas such as ... bloodshed, mass murder, [and] traumas, such as killing one or all members of his group ... and proceed with the work."

On a practical level, Schultz sees a need for investigators to analyze the terrorism manuals and trial data before interrogating the suspected terrorists now being held by the Justice Department. "That frames how you debrief them, how you start to build a database on the operational approaches of the networks," Schultz says.

Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the Rand Corp. who was an adviser to the National Commission on Terrorism, says that the government has synthesized the information from the trials and manuals. He says it has used this information to make a persuasive case to NATO allies that the September 11 attacks were the work of Al Qaeda and that NATO countries should arrest cell members in their countries. The information about Al Qaeda "did not provide a predictive capability, but provided a very powerful diplomatic tool," Jenkins said.

David R. Andrews, who was a high-ranking legal adviser to the State Department, agrees. He says that the government is constantly on the lookout for testimony that sheds light on terrorism activities. "I recall myself going over testimony of individuals in a potential terrorism situation," he said. "The problem there is that there hasn't always been a central location for all this kind of information."

At least one group is trying to systematically collect and analyze information from terrorist trials. A team led by Brent L. Smith of the University of Alabama (Birmingham) has put together a database of 420 people who were indicted on domestic or international terrorism charges between 1980 and 1999. He hopes to make the raw data and his analysis available to prosecutors on a secure Web site within the next year or two.

But no such project seems to be in the works for information contained in the terrorism manuals. Many former government officials said they appreciate Ashcroft's anti-disclosure position and investigators' reluctance to more widely disseminate details about terrorists' methods.

"You always have to take care that you don't make terrorists out of non-terrorists and that the documents stay in [law enforcement] custody and aren't leaked to nonprofessionals," Heibel says.

If anyone needs a reminder in the wake of Sept. 11 of the importance of being vigilant, Wedgwood offers one: Violence is Al Qaeda's first option--not the last one after exhausting all others.