Way of the Gun

As July 4 approaches, people are hunkering down and waiting for the terrorists to strike, whether with nerve gas in the subways, fuel trucks plowing into synagogues, bombs carried in kayaks, or assaults by fighters swimming to their targets in scuba suits. "They could hit us any day," Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, tells the nation.

According to various recent reports, over the past two months, perhaps as many as 25 terrorists have slipped into the U.S. as stowaways. Osama bin Laden himself was reportedly last seen in April in northeastern Afghanistan and is expected to release another of his tapes before the holiday. There have been numerous warnings about dirty bombs and weapons of mass destruction.

But the damage could come in the form of a much more conventional attack. An e-mail recently making the rounds of military and law-enforcement circles describes a captured al-Qaida training tape said to reveal the group's expertise in small arms and close commando situations in urban settings like New York, Washington and Chicago. The people seen training are skilled at handling rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and at making quick attacks and retreats. The footage may be fake, although the people sending the tape around are military veterans with extensive combat experience.

One scenario involves ambushing cops. An apparently disabled vehicle is parked just before a freeway ramp, with shooters hidden inside. When the police officer pulls up, someone inside blows the horn, and the shooters burst out firing. Then there's the residential assassination, where someone knocks on the door of a home, then empties his gun into whoever answers. There's also the golf-course assassination, where an RPG-type rocket is lobbed onto a golf green, taking out the security vehicle and leaving the golfers to be mowed down by rifle fire.

In other scenarios, terrorists rappel down the side of a building from the roof, move through tunnels or sewers, carry out drive-by kidnappings, and blow up guard houses to get into the main building lying behind. Drive-by killings can be executed on motorcycles, with the shooter standing on rear pegs with arms extended over the driver, firing as the bike races down the street.

For bigger raids, terrorists carry concealed weapons into a building, say a school or a financial institution; then in a swift show of violence, they take over the room, marching people up to the roof. TV reporters and photojournalists are allowed in. The kidnappers then begin to execute prisoners one by one in front of the cameras. The tape suggests planning several simultaneous raids to gain maximum exposure. The key point is that absolutely no one is left alive—men, women, children, all are killed.

In advice to law enforcement, one analyst of this training tape urges cops to begin shooting as soon as they recognize what's going on and not to wait for any SWAT team or other support. Complying at any point is useless, since everyone will be ritually executed on the roof.

If retiring North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms gets one last wish, American armed forces will not only be fighting terrorists all around the world, but they'll also face an additional task: springing Yankees from nations intent on turning them over for trial on war crimes at the new International Criminal Court.

President Bill Clinton signed the treaty setting up the court, where today Slobodan Milosevic sits in the dock. The Republican right was appalled at this move, and President George Bush recently undid the signing of the treaty. Now the Senate has passed the American Service Member's Protection Act, authorizing the use of armed force to release U.S. soldiers taken into custody for trial.

In a Washington Times article titled "No Court Dates for America," Helms and Georgia Senator Zell Miller cautioned, "The new court may very well run amok." They argue their bill would keep other countries from trumping up charges against Americans.

"Critics of the U.S. position mutter that the United States should remain involved in the structure of the court," they continued. "Baloney. Just as the United States avoided membership in the ill-constructed League of Nations nearly a century ago, the United States should keep this new international travesty as far away from the American people as possible."

Anyone who buys the line that the FBI's bad old days ended with the death of J. Edgar Hoover can think again. Take one look at the scarcely believable tale of how the agency set up environmental activist Judi Bari when her car exploded in May 1990 in Oakland.



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