DEFENSE SYSTEM AFTER 9/11

Defense system after 9/11

Defense system after 9/11

Introduction

The September 11, 2001 hijacking of four U.S. airliners and the subsequent ramming of three of them into the two towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was the worst mass casualty terrorist attack in U.S. history. Approximately 3,000 people from over 80 countries lost their lives at the World Trade Center in New York. Another 179 Americans lost their lives in the Pentagon that same morning.

In the days following the terrorist use of airliners as missiles, the United States was faced with a series of anthrax attacks delivered to victims and target offices through the U.S. mail system. At the time of this writing, there have been five deaths from anthrax, and the offices of ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, The New York Post, The Sun tabloid offices, Microsoft headquarters, and the offices of Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Tom Daschle, New York Governor George Putaki, and others have been polluted with anthrax - laced mail.

This late 2001 series of anthrax attacks via the U.S. Postal Service fulfilled the warnings of those who had warned of the inevitability of future bioterrorist events. The anthrax attacks of 2001 in the United States validated the previous warnings by some experts concerning bioterrorism that it was not a question of “if,” it was a question of “when.” Now such bioterrorism is a historical fact, not just a prediction of the future.

The anthrax attacks of 2001 may be a taste of things to come. They may inspire some inevitable copycat attacks by other high

Discussion

The fierce partisan political warfare that has characterized Washington policy issues since the mid-1990s has now thankfully subsided. All hope that the new spirit will last beyond the current crisis. But principled disagreements on key issues remain, particularly on missile defense. There is no bipartisan consensus.

Representative John Spratt, a key moderate Democratic leader in the US House of Representatives, told an expert gathering at the Carnegie Endowment in November that the Democrats receded on the missile defense issues after 11 September "because we did not want to be in a position of hammering at the administration at this critical time." Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services Carl Levin writes in the October issue of Arms Control Today: "Those of us who have argued that unilaterally deploying a missile defense system could make the United States less, ...