Gene Healy on Al Qaeda and Peter L. Bergen's Holy War, Inc.:
"Don't get me wrong: Al Qaeda's patience and detailed planning of operations is impressive. But how do you get a speedboat full of explosives right up next to an American destroyer (the U.S.S. Cole)? How do you hijack a plane with a boxcutter? You do it by capitalizing on the fact that everyone that ought to be vigilant is asleep at the switch."
"Is AQ a paper tiger? I wouldn't go that far. But I wonder if they're as dangerous as federal power-grabbers have led us to believe. We've gone 10 months without a major terror attack. And I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe that that's because the FBI is on top of things."
I agree. Al Qaeda's, or any organization's ability to hurt us is further enabled by our inevitable ability to stick our heads up our asses. After six years in the USMC with a security clearance and living on several Marine Corps bases I can attest to the fact that folks were indeed "asleep at the switch." In a particularly disturbing circumstance, I spent two years getting investigated for the disappearance of a STU III telephone (a phone that allows people to initiate an encrypted "secure" line for phone communications). This investigation continued to focus on me, even when all the circumstantial evidence pointed to a particularly high-ranking enlisted Marine who was about to retire. He retired and like magic, the investigation faded away into the ether. No arrests, no "sorry Sgt Landrith for dragging you through ringer". Nothing. The phone was gone and the most likely suspect allowed to retire. Not that someone wanting this particular phone couldn't have obtained it through other means, but the fact that it had been stolen at all was cause for concern.
Today the level of encryption offered by the STU III can be commercially sold legally. At the time of the theft (November 1990, just before the battalion left for Desert Shield/Storm) that was not the case. The biggest question in my mind is still, why did he take the phone? To sell it to a foreign entity, either terrorist or espionage-related for the purposes of reverse engineering? As a souvenir? For the Hell of it? NCIS and MCB Camp Lejeune were asleep at the switch indeed.
One week prior to the theft, it became apparent to me and the leadership of the battalion that the folks in charge of distribution of the phones (at Base headquarters) didn't know which battalions on the base had physical custody of which phones with any real certainty. The individual I suspect to be involved was one of only 4 or 5 individuals in my battalion privy to this knowledge of the Base's ineptness with controlling custody of the STU III's. He was also the individual who "noticed" it missing — after hours, packed up at the bottom of an embarkation box he had no business messing with. The scary part is that he had no way of knowing that it had been in that particular box in the first place, since I was the only person with access to what equipment had been packed in which box. In other words, he just magically knew it was missing out of one of many packed embarkation boxes, one week after it came to his knowledge that there had been poor documentation of the phones by idiots at Base headquarters. This is only one of the strange occurences that took place during my time in that particular battalion. And NCIS and MCB Camp Lejeune let him retire without so much as a once-over. Amazing, sleeping idiots.
Further, prior to September 11, getting on to most military bases (even those that checked for base-issued decals) in this country was a very simple matter. It's still not that hard. For obvious reasons I'll not delve further into that. Clearly some folks are still sleeping.