http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=Focus&oid=56434
ABS-CBNNEWS.COM
Sunday, August 1, 2004 11:31 PM
Passports: al-Qaeda's terror weapons
Vienna, Austria - They're just little embossed rectangles in burgundy,
forest green or navy blue, but they can lay a nation bare to a terrorist
plot.
Passports, not box cutters or even jetliners, may be al-Qaeda's most
powerful weapons. Stolen and legitimate, doctored and untouched, they have
enabled Osama bin Laden's network and other terror groups to plan and carry
out attacks worldwide.
In its final report, the US commission investigating the Sept.11 attacks
touts high-tech biometric passports, still in the developmental stage, and
better border guard training as key ways to tighten the United States'
defenses.
But antiterrorism experts, mindful of the ingenuity demonstrated by
Islamic militants, told The Associated Press they feel humbled and helpless.
"One of the hidden criticisms [in the report] is that not only were we not
prepared on Sept. 11, but the measures we've taken from Sept. 11 to today
have not improved the matter that much," said Michael Greenberger, who was
a Justice Department official during the Clinton administration.
"Our databases are a mess. Change a person's middle initial and he doesn't
show up," said Greenberger, who now directs the University of Maryland's
Center for Health and Homeland Security. "By and large, we've not been
terribly successful."
The commission offers no argument. "No one can hide his or her debt by
acquiring a credit card with a slightly different name," said its report,
released last week. "Yet today, a terrorist can defeat the link to
electronic records by tossing away an old passport and slightly altering
the name in the new one."
Conceding it has only "fragmentary" evidence of the travels of the Sept.
11 organizers and hijackers, the commission's 567-page report nonetheless
is packed with detailed accounts of how the terrorists obtained and
modified the passports that got them into the United States.
A key panel recommendation points up the seriousness of the threat:
"Targeting travel is at least as powerful a weapon against terrorists as
targeting their money. The United States should combine terrorist travel
intelligence, operations, and law enforcement in a strategy to intercept
terrorists, find terrorist travel facilitators, and constrain terrorist
mobility."
That, experts say, is far easier said than done. "If you have someone who
is determined to evade immigration controls, they'll do it -- or at least
they'll have a good chance," said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's
Intelligence Digest. "I don't see any evidence to suggest that we've had
any success in making [al-Qaeda] any less of a threat."
Al-Qaeda once brazenly operated its own passport office at the airport in
Kandahar, Afghanistan, where the group "altered papers, including
passports, visas and identification cards" before the Sept. 11 attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the commission notes.
Although the US-led war in Afghanistan ended such Taliban-protected
operations, there are plenty of terrorists worldwide who are skilled in
doctoring documents, the panel warns. It says al-Qaeda and others have
refined half a dozen simple yet highly effective techniques.
Among the most popular is obtaining stolen passports, which authorities
say are available on a lucrative black market that stretches from Eastern
Europe to Southeast Asia and South Africa.
There are up to 10 million lost or stolen passports in circulation
worldwide, according to Interpol estimates.
"You can find all sorts of fake passports in the Balkans, including stolen
or fake American documents, a former high-ranking police official in Serbia
told AP on condition of anonymity.Experts say they're being sold for as
little as US$75, although US passports can fetch US$3,000 or more.
Al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists intercepted in Europe had obtained
South African passports they apparently got from crime syndicates operating
within the government agency that issues the documents, officials disclosed
to AP last week.
Another commonly used technique involves adding or removing visa cachets
and entry and exit stamps. By doing so, experts say, terrorists can delete
any evidence of their travel to suspicious destinations such as Afghanistan
or Pakistan. They also can create false trails to throw authorities off
track.
Two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar,
apparently flew to Bangkok because "they thought it would enhance their
cover as tourists to have passport stamps from a popular tourist
destination such as Thailand," the commission says.
Some simply would turn in passports filled with suspicion-arousing visas
and stamps from countries where al-Qaeda operated -- even if the documents
were still valid for another year -- and get new, clean ones. Fourteen of
the 19 suicide hijackers, exhorted by Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, obtained new passports. Others work to acquire as many passports
as possible, reasoning that a Canadian or Belgian passport is less likely
to prompt scrutiny from US border guards than one from Saudi Arabia.
In one case cited by the commission, convicted terrorist Ahmed Ressam
obtained a blank baptismal certificate that a document vendor had stolen
from a Roman Catholic Church in Montreal, and used it to get a genuine
Canadian passport. Saudi hijackers had a problem: If they traveled to
Afghanistan via Pakistan, and the Pakistanis stamped their passports, they
risked having them confiscated back in Saudi Arabia.
"So operatives either erased the Pakistani visas from their passports or
traveled through Iran, which did not stamp visas directly into passports,"
the commission says. Tehran has angrily denied any complicity in the Sept.
11 attacks, even though the panel contends up to 10 of the hijackers passed
through Iran en route to the United States.
Al-Qaeda operative Tawfiq bin Attash indicated that Malaysia repeatedly
was used as a place to plot attacks "because its government did not require
citizens of Saudi Arabia or other Gulf states to have a visa." Bin Attash,
better known as Khallad, helped bomb the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000,
killing 17 American sailors.
Greenberger is among many pushing for the swift consolidation of travel
databases "so these names start popping up." He and others also are
pressing for the introduction of supposedly tamper-proof biometric
passports that will contain digital photographs and fingerprints.
The European Union agreed in March to fast track the inclusion of
biometric data in passports by the end of 2006. Belgium has vowed to be
among the first by introducing its new travel documents next year, and
Austria, Denmark and Slovenia have developed working prototypes.
"We've got to adopt the technology and get away from purely paper
documents," Greenberger said. "Nothing is going to be foolproof, but by
altering the technology, I think it's possible to raise our defenses," he
said. "The harder we make it to forge documents, the greater our gains in
protecting the borders. You're really upping the ante."
But Standish, of Janes' Intelligence Digest, is skeptical. "The basic
problem is that if a document of any kind can be produced, it can be
falsified or forged," he said. "As an IRA terrorist once famously said to
the authorities: `You have to be lucky all the time. I only have to be
lucky once."'
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R. A. Hettinga