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----- Original Message -----
From: Hei Ron CONT
DLPC
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2000 11:16 AM
Subject: FW: FYI -- Defense & Foreign Affairs
Daily Briefing 16 OCT 00
FYI: Excerpt from: Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily Briefing 16 OCT 00 US Handling of Response to USS Cole Attack Seen as Critical to US Strategic Projection, Domestic Political Situation ANALYSIS. By Gregory R. Copley,(see Note 1) Editor, GIS. The actual and perceived response by the United States Government to the terrorist attack on the Arleigh Burke-class Aegis destroyer USS Cole (DDG-67) in the port of Aden on October 12, 2000, is now seen as a critical milestone in US strategic credibility worldwide, and to the US domestic attitude toward the incumbent Clinton-Gore Administration. (See Note 2) The changing nature of international terrorism, in which there is now greater masking of the specific - but not the general - perpetrators of the terrorist acts increases the difficulty of formulating decisive responses and thereby increases the perception of impotence of the target government. The sense of impotence and frustration is only increased when the victim threatens strong retaliatory action and then cannot deliver. US Secretary of Defense William Cohen, shortly after the Cole attack (but after a sufficient timelag as to already indicate a lack of preparedness), made a statement which was almost identical to the US leadership statements following all recent incidents: "If ... we determine that terrorists attacked our ship and killed our sailors, then we will not rest until we have tracked down those who are responsible for this vicious and cowardly act." Despite (or perhaps because of) numerous recent visits to Yemen by senior US defense personnel, the US defense and intelligence community clearly failed to adequately assess the threat to visiting US warships and defense personnel. That is not to say that all terrorist acts can be prevented by good intelligence, but rather that terrorist acts can often be deterred through good physical security and better contextual intelligence. In the case of Yemen, it should have been clear that there was a heightened need for security, given Yemen's background, and particularly given the fact that some Yemeni and Islamist factions alike - and particularly the South Yemenis who fought a civil war in 1994 against North Yemen after national unification in 1990 - have a strong interest in embarrassing the Yemen Republic's (northern) President, Lt.-Gen. Ali Abdallah Salih. Those who follow the "global jihad" theory can make the case that the Cole incident was almost totally a response to the present Islamist war against Israel and (according to the fatwa issued by London-based Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed of the UK Shari'a Court) the United States. Those who have spent years following the South Yemeni revolt against the British colonialization of Aden, the overthrow of the traditional rulers, the earlier resentment of the Turkish and Egyptian overlords, and so on, and the more recent bitter South Yemeni guerilla war against Oman, can point - particularly following the relatively forced union of South Yemen (the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, an extreme marxist state) with North Yemen (Yemen Arab Republic) - to the entrenched nature of guerilla warfare in Aden. There are many surviving members of the British Royal Marines, the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force who can attest to the fact that the Aden station was one of the toughest combat zones during the 1960s. And the people there continued their fighting after the UK withdrew from "East of Suez" in 1960. The reality is that the heightened threat to US naval transits through Aden was the culmination of a number of factors, which include the Bin Laden-led/coordinated jihad as well as the local factors. For many of the combatants, the jihad merely lent a new fervor to their xenophobia and their ongoing wars. What, then, does this mean in terms of the security of US warships transiting Aden? The refueling and transit arrangements were meant not only to assist the US Navy in its deployments, but also to signify and cement relations between the US and the Yemen Republic, controlled from the old northern capital, Sana'a' by the former YAR President (now Yemen Republic President), Gen. Salih. For the US to cease such visits now, after only a year, would clearly indicate weakness and fear on the part of the US, as far as regional observers are concerned. How, then, should the US secure its position without incurring major human and financial costs? To begin with, proper attention needs to be paid to routine security during refueling stops. This was clearly not the case with the Cole stopover, despite the reluctance of Washington to assign blame for the incident to the ship's captain. Aden was obviously a very risky stop-over, and as such, advance security precautions should have been taken to ensure that a secure arrangement was in place for refueling. That would have meant, for one thing, putting one or more of the Cole's tenders into the water for mooring procedures, and using the Cole's tender to collect any pilot or refueling officials who might have been needed from shoreside. That there was "advance intelligence" on the Cole's visit should have been obvious. Not specifically that the USS Cole was going to visit, or that a US warship would visit on a specific date. But, rather, it was known that the US Navy was using Aden, as it had done a dozen or so times during the previous year, to refuel. The modus operandi was, or could easily be, known by observation, and during the past year there was ample time to penetrate the local infrastructure to put in place an attack which merely - as all ambushes do - awaited the arrival of the victim. The fact that the attack occurred when it did indicated that the perpetrators wished to link it with the escalated jihad against Israel and the US. Why, then, was the Cole's handling procedure so lax in the face of an obvious security threat? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the US Navy does not give its crews sufficient time aboard any single vessel to build really good ship-handling skills. There is an over-reliance on technology, and insufficient reliance on seamanship which is built on teamwork development. This may be the inevitable result of short-service enlistments. The Royal Australian Navy, which has traditionally had much longer service enlistments, for example, is able to keep sailors aboard their ships for far longer tours of duty, with the result that they become more adept ship handlers, and are more able to handle such matters as awkward situations as the Cole encountered with greater ease. In the US Navy, as in most navies today, seamanship is giving way to political correctness and comfort. Where discipline and teamwork suffers, danger increases. It seems unlikely that, in the present political climate, the USN will be able to address this problem easily, as much as many career naval personnel would wish it. But the US political response to the incident is of more urgent importance for Washington. The United States on Friday, October 13, 2000, ordered its embassies and consulates in Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa to close until the following week, amid fears of anti-US violence after the attack on the USS Cole and continuing clashes between Israel and the Palestinians. US missions in 13 Arab and seven African nations had also been shut and remain closed to the public until Monday, October 16, 2000, a State Department spokesman said. The move to close - even temporarily - the most heavily-guarded embassies and diplomatic missions in the world is a clear victory for not only the group which undertook the attack, but for the entire Islamist coalition. It is a clear defeat for the US and for the moderate Muslim leaders who had thrown in their lot with the West. The missions affected in the Middle East include those in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. In Africa, missions closed under the order include the embassies in Djibouti, Kenya, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Tanzania. In Nigeria, the closure affected both the embassy in Abuja and consulate in Lagos, and in South Africa the order affected three missions: the embassy in Pretoria and consulates in Cape Town and Durban. The response to the attack by the US Defense Department and White House made the US Administration appear confused and paralyzed: impotent. The closure of the diplomatic missions looked like fear and weakness. It was as though the Clinton Administration had learned nothing from the earlier attacks on US interests by terrorist groups. There was not even any real appearance that the US Government understood who had actually initiated the attack, although clearly, behind the scenes, there was intense intelligence community activity focused on the matter. What has been clear is that Yemen, despite the apparent desire of Pres. Salih to work with the US, has become an increasing focus for radical activities, some Islamist, some merely nationalistic or anti-Western. It is not surprising that Osama Bin Laden's family comes from the Hadramaut region of what was South Yemen; nor that there is a strong connection through London between Bin Laden, Yemeni groups and the pro-Bin Laden Islamist leadership in the UK. And what is occurring very rapidly is a fusion of interests between the Islamists, the anti-Western xenophobes/nationalists in Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries with the traditionally moderate Muslim communities, who feel that they have nowhere else to go. The Islamist objective of driving a wedge between the non-Muslim world and the Muslim world is increasingly succeeding, much to the consternation of moderate Muslims and non-Muslims alike. There appears to be no recognition within either the political levels of the Clinton Administration in the US, nor the Blair Administration in the UK (where much of the radical Islamist coordination takes place), as to how to deal with the matter. Notes: 1 Gregory Copley's specializations include more than 30 years' involvement in psychological strategy studies, on which he has written and lectured extensively. 2 A Yemeni group, the Army of Aden-Abyan, sometimes known as the Army of Mohammed, claimed responsibility for the attack on the USS Cole. Details of this organization, and the background to Yemeni insurrections and rivalries, can be found in the Yemen section of GIS. The Army of Aden-Abyan allegedly advised a UK-based, Syrian-born Islamist leader, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, that it had undertaken the attack on USS Cole, and this organization would, by virtue of its roots in Aden, certainly have been well-placed to undertake the attack. It is credited also with numerous other kidnappings and murders in Yemen in recent years. Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, and the Army of Aden-Abyan, have known links to international Islamist leader Osama Bin Laden. Bakri, who uses the title "Amir of Al-Muhajiroun" (literally, "prince of the emigrants"), also calls himself "the eyes and ears of Bin Laden". Bakri's connection with the Army of Aden-Abyan highlights the UK-Yemen connection in recent radical, criminal and Islamist terrorist activities. Another Yemeni Islamist based in London is Abu Hamza al-Masiri, who heads an organization known as the "Servants of Shari'a" (SOS) lost both hands and eyes fighting in Afghanistan; his son is presently imprisoned in Yemen. Bakri, who welcomed the attack on the Cole, is a judge in the UK Shari'a Court, a non-governmental organization in the UK. He has routinely called for terrorist action against Israel and the US and issued a key fatwa calling for attacks on all governments which support Israel or the US. This could be taken to also include Yemen's Government, which has a military agreement with the US. One of his recent "rulings" included the section: "To ally or seek assistance of non-Muslim states is prohibited, a sin and a grave crime not to mention a betrayal of Allah (swt), His Messenger and all the believers. Hence whosoever amount you all his country to become a base for American, Jewish or other kufr forces or conspires and makes Muslim land a passage for any non-Muslim forces whether it be via sea, land or air, assisting directly or indirectly, an attack against Muslims in any part of the world will be at war with Allah (swt) and His Messenger. He will be humiliating himself before Alllah (swt) and before the whole Ummah who will never forgive this ugly crime even if the perpetrator erects barriers to hide behind." Donald J. Rowan 8501 Aqueduct Road Potomac, Maryland 20854 Voice: (301) 762-3667; FAX: (301) 838-9119; Pager: (301) 565-1382; Mobile: (301) 520-1450 "Always do right- this will gratify some and astonish the rest. " ... Mark Twain |
