The New York Times, July 21, 1996, WIR, p. 5. The Devil's Bargain of a Better World By Tim Weiner Washington. The arc of the burning plane falling into the ocean, the fire glowing on the dark waters, shed light on how vulnerable we are. When a jumbo jet falls from the sky, technology has failed or terrorism has succeeded. In the hours after Flight 800 went down off Fire Island, everyone in officialdom said there was no reason to believe it was a terrorist attack. Nearly everyone else instinctively believed it was. However the facts turn out, it is revealing that Americans thought first of a bomb borne by angry men on a mission from God. There was no more evidence to blame it on it was close enough to truth, given the absence of facts, Americans' shared fear of terror and their faith in technology. In any event, if the crash turns out to have been an accident -- horrible but still an act of God -- the relief may be fleeting. "It doesn't matter whether it was a bomb or not, in the way we think of it -- it's what we expect," said Ronald Steel, professor of International relations at the University of Southern California and author of "Temptations of a Superpower" (Harvard, 1995). "We know it's going to happen somewhere --if not this airplane, then the World Trade Center, Lockerbie, the bombs in Saudi Arabia and Paris and London. This is a part of our life. If for some reason this wasn't a bomb, we better get ready for one tomorrow." [See Steel's NYT Op-Ed today: http://jya.com/rsteel.txt.] High-Tech Freedom With the doubled-edge sword of technology, Americans have carved a world of gleaming aircraft and guided missiles. The airplanes that transport them, the cell phones and television cables and computers that link them, define how they live, how they work, how they take their pleasure. They are right up there with freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear. They make America rich, powerful, and free. But Americans cannot control technology; increasingly, it controls them. And when the people Americans fear get their hands on it, the fear is accelerated and amplified by 500 channels of interwoven media hype. The airlines and telephones and E-mail that connect Americans connect those other people too: a computer disk is the crucial piece of evidence in the current trial of Ramzi Ahmed Yusef, accused of planning to blow a fleet of commercial planes from the sky (and in a pending case, of leading the World Trade Center bombing). The subway rider poisoned in Tokyo and the American soldier blown out of bed in Dhahran share a common knowledge: High technology may make a fine sword, but it is a flawed shield. It cannot stop every nut with a grudge. Americans are slowly getting used to the idea that one can no longer go through the world without passing through security. They are learning to live with terror and the technology of counter-terrorism, as people have for years in Tel Aviv and Cairo, Belfast and Berlin, Karachi and Algiers. They all visit those cities now; they enter them every time they walk through a metal detector. So life feels more and more like an international airport: identity checkpoints and security zones in concrete and glass buildings, pretty flowers planted in concrete barricades outside, robot voices delivering warnings. The fear means they arrive early to spend more down time waiting in line to pass through security. So they adapt, thinking: That's not a barricade, it's a flowerpot. They give up a little freedom in exchange for feeling safe, "all watched over," as the late poet Richard Brautigan wrote, "by machines of loving grace." Visitors The people who hate, love, envy and fear America's prosperity and power, also pass through that international airport. The United States needs their oil for fuel; it needs their sweat for work Americans don't do any more. They are woven into America, traveling through open lines of trade and telecommunications and technology. So everybody learns to live with the fear of the bomb in the cargo bay: you have to catch that plane if you have business abroad. If the United States were determined to buy machines that could sniff out the Semtex in the boombox, it could have done it -- the cost is perhaps $2 billion, or slightly less than one Stealth nuclear bomber. But that is not the war Washington prepared to fight after Vietnam. Generals today want wars they are sure to win. We -- the United States -- have the smart bombs, built with the billions that bankrupted Moscow and made America Number One. They -- the furious and the powerless -- have the dumb bombs, made from fertilizer and fuel oil, ignited by rage and religion. But the United States can't stop them all, not with its ever-tightening laws, not with its trillion- dollar military, not with its weapons and warheads. So the thinking goes. On the simplest level, terrorism works: it terrifies. It can increase the technology of control and erode the edges of the Constitution. That can fuel the fear of Big Brother, make people paranoid -- and in turn promote the homegrown madness that exploded last year in Oklahoma City. Terrorism cannot destroy the United States, but it has the power to wound, outrage, sadden and change it. When Iranians took Americans hostage and controlled the nation's politics from half a world away, when a suicide bomber blew up 241 American soldiers in Beirut and drove the Marines from Lebanon, when the World Trade Center shook, when the Dhahran barracks went up in smoke, it expressed a burning anger in the world, the anger of the poor and the powerless and the God-mad and the stateless. The Method Through repetition, Americans are slowly coming to recognize the method in this madness: These attacks are meant as blows against the global dominance of American culture, money, power and technology. Mr. Steel says the United States' stature as the one surviving superpower and the architect of the new world order is the very thing that makes it a target. "Terror," he says, "is the weapon that the powerless use against the powerful. We don't have any conception of what an ideologically threatening power we are to people who have different beliefs. Globalization and modernization are truly threatening to people. They're even threatening to the working class in this country because they drive down wages. The very faith in technology that we spread is something that runs head-on into another faith based on tradition, asceticism and authority. We're the alien ideology now." [End] ---------- The New York Times, July 21, 1996, p. 25. Top F.B.I. Investigator Is Known for Bluntness James K. Kallstrom the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation s New York City office, is a technical wizard who has bugged, wiretapped and generally bedeviled mobsters, terrorists and other criminals for more than two decades. The crash investigation is the first major, high-profile investigation of Mr. Kallstrom's tenure of a year and a half. Since Wednesday night, Mr. Kallstrom has spent most of his time shuttling, in a Blackhawk military helicopter, between the F.B.I. command center, at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, and the crash site, where he has held two press conferences a day with a top official of the National Transportation Safety Board. Mr. Kallstrom is known for a no-nonsense, blunt approach with his colleagues. He also never passes up a chance to express some strongly felt opinions, they say. Often, Mr. Kallstrom has offered his long-held view that Congress is not doing enough to help Federal law enforcement in its fight against criminals who use new technologies, such as the Internet. Since the crash Wednesday night, Mr. Kallstrom has had a strong suspicion that it was tied to a bomb or missile. "You have a lot of things that look like terrorism," Mr. Kallstrom said at a press conference Friday afternoon. "At some point in time, we're going to reach critical mass and then we're going to be prepared to say exactly what we think it is." As late as last night, he said he had not seen anything to make him change that opinion. But publicly, at least, Mr. Kallstrom has been reluctant to declare that the crash was caused by a bomb or missile until physical evidence, enough to reach a "beyond a reasonable doubt" threshold, is found. By selecting Mr. Kallstrom as assistant director in charge of the New York Office in February 1995, the F.B.I. Director, Louis J. Freeh, chose one of the bureau's most respected surveillance experts, a man whose techniques played a critical role in the arrests of every major organized crime leader and terrorist in New York in the last 20 years, including those involved with the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. [End]