It is a quandary as old as Aesop and as fresh as the morning's news: When should a threat prompt a warning? And how many warnings without either disaster or a confirmed defusing does it take to make even the worst threat seem somehow less urgent, or credible or real?
Almost every time the administration of US President George W. Bush has issued an elevated-threat warning over the last two years -- often as a result of menacing but imprecise intelligence -- it has faced such questions. Administration officials from the president on down say they have little choice, and they believe that such warnings have a deterrent, disruptive effect on plotting by al-Qaeda.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
On Sunday, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge not only issued a public warning for financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington, but also took the unusual step of conducting a conference call with network anchors and newspaper editors to alert them that the warning was coming. As he had before, Ridge pledged increased vigilance, then urged even those workers most directly affected by the threat to say, "Well, we know what you know, and we're going to go about leading our lives."
But how?
"In a society such as ours is becoming, it is intolerable that officials might know about an impending attack and not make this knowledge public," said Philip Bobbitt, a law professor at the University of Texas who is an expert on international security affairs.
"On the other hand, it hands the terrorists a costless if minor victory by terrorizing the population. If officials try to minimize that impact -- `Go on about your business, et cetera' -- they dilute the effectiveness of the announcement and encourage a complacency they were trying to pierce with the announcement in the first place," Bobbit said.
Bush himself was emphatic, telling reporters in the Rose Garden on Monday: "We have an obligation. When we find out something, we got to share it. And what we're talking about here is a very serious matter based upon sound intelligence. And I would hope the people affected in New York realize that by sharing intelligence, we can better prepare in case something were to happen.
"In other words, if we were just silent on the subject, I think people would be a lot more nervous," he said.
Would they?
Ridge has raised the color-coded threat level from yellow to orange on five previous occasions, often as a result of threats that were relatively specific as to time but not to place. Previous confidential warnings to local law enforcement agencies alerting them to possible attacks on specific sites, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Sears Tower in Chicago, have leaked out, sometimes prompting more confusion than clarity.
Just last month, Ridge endured some criticism for announcing that the nation faced a heightened threat from al-Qaeda in the period leading up to the fall election while also saying there was not enough detailed information to warrant increasing the official threat level.
On Sunday, Ridge did just that, with a public notice unlike any that had come before.
He warned of threats against specific buildings in at least three cities, yet offered no real sense of whether active plots were under way or when such attacks might be planned to occur, "beyond the period leading up to our national elections."
One obvious goal of such warnings is to prompt increased vigilance by everyone from top law enforcement officials to everyday civilians. Such vigilance has paid off in the past.
A plot to bomb Los Angeles during the millennium celebrations may well have been foiled by a single alert customs agent who spotted a suspiciously nervous Algerian named Ahmed Ressam trying to cross the Canadian border at a remote ferry terminal in Washington state.
"The general approach of empowering millions of people by putting them on the lookout is no doubt a good one," Bobbitt said.
Another goal is to shake up al-Qaeda, by making plotters aware that the government is watching.
"If anything, what this kind of thing does is cause disarray within al-Qaeda," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"The administration has not given away anything about its sources or methods of intelligence. Nobody in al-Qaeda knows who said what, or how much, or how deeply they're penetrated. This basically creates disruption," Cordesman said.
But do such repeated warnings run the risk of producing "terror fatigue"?
"I think there may be a dulling effect," Cordesman said.
"But the alternative is not to stop issuing warnings and wait for people to be killed," Cordesman said.
Ridge's spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said that the secretary had informed Bush about his intention to issue the elevated warning at about 10am Sunday, and that there had been no debate or second-guessing by the White House.
"The intelligence in this case was very specific," he said.
"The president and the secretary have said when we have this level of specificity, we will be able to come out with an elevated warning," he said.
Roehrkasse said Ridge had taken pains to reach out to the television anchors and editors because "he has developed relationships with some of the anchors" and they had asked him to try to give them some context when he got some specific intelligence.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, a veteran of the intelligence committee and a former mayor of San Francisco, said she favored the broadest possible warnings about specific threats. She said secret warnings to states and localities would seep out anyway, creating confusion and recriminations.
"This is a Hobson's choice," she said in a telephone interview.
"If you don't warn people and something happens, and you knew about it, you have a real problem. The other thing is by warning people and causing them to be alert, you may very well pick up somebody who has been skulking in a doorway around the World Bank or the Stock Exchange. We're all in this in one boat, and we recognize that in the world of terror, it can happen to anybody, anywhere," she said.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
In an article published on this page on Tuesday, Kaohsiung-based journalist Julien Oeuillet wrote that “legions of people worldwide would care if a disaster occurred in South Korea or Japan, but the same people would not bat an eyelid if Taiwan disappeared.” That is quite a statement. We are constantly reading about the importance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), hailed in Taiwan as the nation’s “silicon shield” protecting it from hostile foreign forces such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and so crucial to the global supply chain for semiconductors that its loss would cost the global economy US$1
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
Sasha B. Chhabra’s column (“Michelle Yeoh should no longer be welcome,” March 26, page 8) lamented an Instagram post by renowned actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) about her recent visit to “Taipei, China.” It is Chhabra’s opinion that, in response to parroting Beijing’s propaganda about the status of Taiwan, Yeoh should be banned from entering this nation and her films cut off from funding by government-backed agencies, as well as disqualified from competing in the Golden Horse Awards. She and other celebrities, he wrote, must be made to understand “that there are consequences for their actions if they become political pawns of
RSS