National Security Watch: Katrina worries national security experts
The government's sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina makes some national security experts worry that the nation is as unprepared to deal with any large-scale terrorist attack as it was during the September 11 attacks four years ago. Similar breakdowns in communications and emergency preparation that plagued the response to the 9/11 attacks were present in the initial rescue efforts in the Gulf Coast.
"Responding to Katrina may be similar to responding to a large-scale WMD event, but far easier because we knew it was coming and we knew what it was," says Jamie Metzl, president of Partnership for a Secure America, a new bipartisan think tank on national security. "What would we have done if this were a mass-casualty WMD terrorist event? Terrorists have now seen how vulnerable we are."
As the project director of a task force on homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations, Metzl co-authored a report in 2003 that concluded the nation remained dangerously ill-prepared to handle another terrorist attack on U.S. soil because first responders, such as firefighters and police, remained ill-prepared and underfunded to respond to such attacks. "Certainly, Katrina has showed us that we are not getting the money to where it is needed most," Metzl told U.S. News.
Dennis Lormel, a former special agent with the FBI who specializes in terrorism, says there were obvious gaps in emergency planning and breakdowns in communication in both the response to the hurricane and the September 11 attacks.
"If you look at 9/11 you had a lot of the same issues in terms of communications," he says. "It doesn't seem like anyone in New Orleans had a contingency plan."
Democrats have seized on the comparison. "First responders on the Gulf Coast should have had the ability to communicate with one another, four years after that glaring deficiency was demonstrated so painfully on 9/11," says House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California. She pointed out that Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, has been asking the government for its overdue national emergency response plan but still hasn't received one.
At a conference on national security here this week in Washington, Sen. Joseph R. Biden, a Delaware Democrat, also made the analogy: "It is not too much of a leap to suggest that if this were not an act of God but a conscious effort to wreak havoc upon the country, we're not so well prepared, to state the obvious." Several committees in both houses of Congress are now investigating what went wrong with the response to the storm.
Terrorism experts say that al Qaeda members are likely watching the response to the storm to try to find the nation's Achilles' heel. Walid Phares, a professor of comparative politics at Florida Atlantic University and an expert on terrorism, says that al Qaeda has enlisted the hurricane as "Sister Katrina" and that supporters of al Qaeda write in online chat rooms that the storm was sent by Allah to destroy U.S. cities. "The enemy is enjoying the show," Phares wrote in a counterterrorism blog.
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