U.S. Policies and Terrorism

• Rejected by experts, a new terror report proposes a militant response to any potential terrorist attack in the U.S., while skirting the main reason for terrorism in the world.

The long-awaited final report of the National Commission on Terrorism (NCT) has "disappointingly turned out to be just another product of the corrosive influence wielded in Washington by Israeli agents and lobbyists," Dr. Vanes sa Hughessen, a national-security scholar at the prestigious Massachusetts In sti tute of Technology (MIT), told The SPOTLIGHT.

The NCT is an advisory panel set up by Congress after the tragic 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa that killed a number of embassy staff.

After nearly a year of research and deliberation, the study group tasked with evaluating America's defenses against terrorism, came up with conclusions "only a Mossad adviser to an African dictator could love," quipped Lt. Col. Hank Coulter, a retired Marine intelligence officer who published a well-regarded book on terrorism last year.

He was not the only expert to note that the 10-member NCT, packed with policy wonks known for their ethnic and emotional ties to Zionism such as Dr. Fred Ikle, proposed tactics developed by the trigger-happy "contract consultants" from the Mossad, Israel's secret service.

Ikle was reportedly behind the commission's most controversial recommendation to let the military take charge of the U.S. government in case of a "major" terrorist attack.

A former undersecretary of defense, Ikle had spearheaded the invasion of the Pentagon's bureaucracy by dual loyalist appointees under the anything-goes Reagan era.

In such an emergency, the armed forces are best equipped to maintain "law and order" and direct anti-terrorist and countersubversive operations, the study group's final report proposed. The military has a well-developed "command and control" system in place, as well as "far greater resources to enforce such measures" than any other national institution, in cluding the Federal Emergency Man age ment Agency (FEMA).

Even Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former deputy director for counterterrorism, rejected this call for replacing America's constitutional governance with martial law at the first terror-bomb explosion as "ill-advised ... unworkable."

This seasoned CIA terrorist-hunter blamed what he called "this cockeyed notion" of using the military to deal with terrorist incidents on the "skull-cracking, internment-camp practices the Mossad has been promoting around here," sources close to Cannistraro have told The SPOTLIGHT.

FEEBLE ATTEMPT

In a lame attempt to explain his group's report, NCT Chairman Paul Bremer said: "We found that terrorists are inclined now to escalate to mass-casualty terrorism ... to counter that we need strong measures."

But a check by this populist newspaper on the most authoritative intelligence information supplied to NCT mem bers revealed that Chairman Bre mer's defensive arguments were false.

The State Department's most recent report on global terrorism points out in its very first chapter that "the number of persons killed or wounded in international terrorist attacks during 1999 fell sharply because of the absence of any attack causing mass casualties."

This despite the fact that the actual number of terrorist incidents rose overall, State's survey noted.

"During 1999, 392 international terrorist attacks occurred, up 43 percent from the 274 attacks recorded the previous year," according to the State Depart ment.

In other words, "the real currents of global terrorism run exactly counter to the trendlines argued by Bremer," explained Dr. Hughessen. "But the worst problem is that, like most of its predecessors, this NCT study studiously avoids dealing with the real origins -- the underlying dynamics of terrorism."

The root causes of this new wave of international political violence spring, not from external enemies, but from "our own compulsion for global meddling, the incessant urge to intervene in disputes and conflicts that are none of our business," explained Dr. Hughessen.

Surprisingly, her views represented an informal consensus of sort, at least in the privately voiced opinions of other national-security experts.

"We have watched one administration after another blundering into overseas trouble spots, flying off American troops to police murderous, hopeless dogfights around the world, most often not even in defense of our own national priorities," asserted Dr. Ronald Dozier, a lecturer in defense studies at the State University of New York.

"Let the voters send a clear message at the next polls: We want to stop out-of-control interventionism," concluded Dr. Hughessen.