Five years later

The Washington Times

It is virtually impossible to meet an American who does not remember where he was or what he was doing five years ago today, September 11, 2001, when we all learned so painfully that oceans and distance would not be enough to keep international jihad away. Between 8:20 A.M. that morning, when a flight attendant on American Airlines flight 11 telephoned a colleague to report that persons were being stabbed with box cutters, and 10:28 A.M., when the second World Trade Center tower collapsed, nearly 3,000 innocent people were brutally murdered. In all, four commercial airliners were hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon, the Twin Towers and a field in Shanksville, Pa. We now know that the terrorists on the fourth plane planned to hit the Capitol or White House, but were prevented from doing so by heroic passengers who stormed the cockpit and fought with the hijackers for control of the airliner before crashing it.

Addressing a joint session of Congress nine days later, President Bush emphasized that the era of military half-measures was over. America's response to September 11 could not be a repeat of the Clinton administration's handling of the 1999 Kosovo campaign, where the military campaign was conducted almost entirely through the air, and it would be very different from the isolated strikes against al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, which took place during the Clinton years.

"Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest," Mr. Bush said. "And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism."

And with that, Mr. Bush did what what four presidents before him -- Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton -- had never been willing or able to do ever since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis: mobilize the country for war against Islamofascist terror groups and their state sponsors that had repeatedly targeted this country. Less than one month after September 11, the United States launched a military campaign that deposed the Taliban dictatorship in Afghanistan. In March 2003, Mr. Bush moved to oust Saddam Hussein, a longtime supporter of terrorism who had been flouting U.N. Security Council disarmament resolutions for 12 years. Less than a week after U.S. troops pulled Saddam out of a spider hole on Dec. 13, 2003, Libyan boss Moammar Gadhafi decided to end his 33-year quest for nuclear weapons.

During the past five years, much has been done to reduce the dangers posed by terrorists and their rogue-state sponsors. Through the Proliferation Security Initiative, or PSI (an initiative which former undersecretary of State and current U.N. Ambassador John Bolton was instrumental in putting together) a coalition of more than 70 nations that is working together to stop shipments of materials used to produce weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, a successful interception of a Libya-bound WMD shipment in October 2003 that was carried out pursuant to PSI helped lead to the dismantling of the Libyan nuclear weapons program and the subsequent unraveling of the A.Q. Khan network: an entity run by a Pakistani nuclear scientist which had been supplying Libya, Iran and North Korea with equipment and technological expertise that they were using to develop nuclear weapons.

Thanks in large part to the president's leadership, Congress passed the Patriot Act to break down the decades-old "wall of separation" between law enforcement and intelligence activities (a problem exacerbated by deputy attorney general and future September 11 commission member Jamie Gorelick during the Clinton years).

Before September 11, terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were able to raise large amounts of money through "charities" and get it to war zones. In the past five years, however, that has changed dramatically. Thanks in no small part to new regulatory authority contained in Section 311 of the Patriot Act and the vigorous efforts by Treasury Department Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey to implement it, Washington had designated more than 40 charities worldwide as sponsors of terrorism, making it much more difficult for them to raise money to maim and murder. The U.S. military has captured or killed scores of prominent terrorist leaders, among them Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, architect of the September 11 attacks, and U.S. law enforcement agencies have broken up numerous terrorist cells operating in this country.

Despite all that has been done in an effort to make us safer, serious problems remain -- in particular the inability to deal a decisive blow to the Sunni and Shi'ite terrorists operating in Iraq -- a critical theater in the international war against Islamofascism. But the most disturbing development domestically is "the war against the war" -- the systematic effort to undermine the ability of Western intelligence to prevent future terrorist attacks on the homeland. One such example was the decision by the New York Times to reveal the existence of the SWIFT program for investigating terrorist financing, something the Pentagon used to track down Hambali -- operations chief of Jemaah Islamiya, which was responsible for the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing which killed more than 200 people. Unraveling complex connections between terrorists and financiers is already difficult enough without some in the media doing the dirty work of tipping off the terrorists.