U.S. Falls Short Hunting Terrorists

WASHINGTON —  Fifteen years after the United States launched a campaign to track down terrorists around the world and bring them to justice, most extremists linked to attacks against American interests are still at large--and not one state sponsor has been held accountable in a U.S. criminal court.

Only 16 suspected terrorists have been extradited to the United States since U.S. legislation passed in the mid-1980s allowed American law enforcement agents to nab them abroad and bring them here for trial. The majority have been convicted. Three are among the four people who went on trial in New York on Monday in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

No top official of any of the countries on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism has been brought to justice.

Those results were underscored by last week’s split verdict in the multimillion-dollar trial of two Libyans charged with the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, igniting a debate over whether the law-and-order approach really makes much of a dent in terrorism. They’ve also raised questions about what else the United States could or should be doing.

Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison for the midair bombing that killed 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland. But Lamen Khalifa Fhimah was acquitted by the Scottish court in the Netherlands. International sanctions against Libya were in effect lifted when the United Nations suspended its embargo in 1999. And Libyan leader Col. Moammar Kadafi, whom Washington ultimately holds responsible for the attack, has been embraced by America’s closest allies in Europe.

“The use of criminal prosecution is a half-measure. It doesn’t do anything to attack the sources of terrorism,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA specialist on terrorism. “By getting Megrahi, we got a functionary, not the people in command and control. It’s like taking away some of the bullets but keeping the gun in use. You can always find more bullets.”

The inherent problem with the law-and-order approach, the skeptics say, is that it basically categorizes terrorism as a crime, not as an attack on a country’s foreign policy or a threat to national security.

“Terrorism is not just about the people who die; it’s the wider message terrorists are trying to send to governments. We tend to focus too much on the individual perpetrator rather than the original conspirators or conspiracy, which is the graver crime. And just throwing people in jail is like swatting at mosquitoes,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. and director of its Washington office.

“The message from Lockerbie is that Kadafi got away with it,” Hoffman said.

The verdict on the law-and-order approach may depend on whether the issue is viewed as a glass half full or half empty.

U.S. counter-terrorism officials contend that bringing terrorists to justice has had an impact far beyond the 10 convictions of extremists such as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York, and Mir Aimal Kansi, for the murder the same year of two employees of the CIA outside the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters. They cite the dramatic decline in the number of deaths caused by terrorist attacks: During the 1980s, 571 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks, compared with 87 in the 1990s.

Officials also say the international consensus that the two Libyan intelligence agents had to face trial, backed up by the squeeze of economic sanctions, has forced a change in Kadafi’s behavior. Libya has deported extremists such as Palestinian Abu Nidal, curtailed state funding of radical groups and not been linked with any recent attacks.

“The use of legal instruments has created a reality and a perception that terrorists cannot act with impunity. Terrorists now understand that if they do attack the United States, we will investigate and pursue and ultimately apprehend them,” said Edmund Hull, head of the State Department’s counter-terrorism office.

The most significant trend over the past two years, in fact, has been the move away from state-sponsored terrorism, according to the State Department’s annual terrorism survey for 2000. Those most active against the United States today are amorphous networks of extremist cells able to act independently of governments.

U.S. counter-terrorism officials attribute the change to the fact that governments are being forced to pay a heavier price for sponsoring terrorism--from economic sanctions to trials of their citizens.

“Countries like North Korea and Sudan have signaled to us clearly their desire to get out of the terrorism business because of both the political and economic cost,” said a senior U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “And we now have a dialogue with both countries to clarify to them what they need to do before we consider them out of the terrorism business.”

The biggest problem for U.S. authorities is the time required to pursue terrorists through the courts. Pan Am Flight 103 has taken a dozen years--so far. The United States is also asking that Libya accept responsibility and pay compensation.

Most terrorist acts over the last quarter of a century are still open cases. No one linked to the series of major attacks in Beirut during the 1980s--the bombings of two U.S. embassies, the abduction of about 100 foreign hostages and the suicide attack on a Marine barracks that killed 241 U.S. military personnel--has yet been brought to justice.

The record is also mixed on victims’ attempts to win compensation--and in effect find states responsible for terrorist actions-- through the courts.

In 1996, Congress passed a law that opened the way for Americans to file lawsuits against a foreign country that is listed by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism for damages arising from certain terrorist acts. (Between 1976 and 1996, U.S. law limited civil suits against foreign countries largely to commercial issues.)

Over the past five years, the courts have awarded more than $1 billion to victims of terrorism or their families, according to the State Department.

The family of Brandeis University junior Alisa Flatow, who was killed in an April 1995 bus bombing in the Gaza Strip, sued Iran because of its support for Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for the attack. The Flatows won the wrongful death suit and a judgment of $247.5 million.

But the Flatows were blocked by U.S. courts from seizing American assets and diplomatic properties owned by Iran, on grounds that they are protected by international agreements.

Last year, former Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson won an even larger judgment of $341 million in a suit against Iran for aiding and abetting the Hezbollah extremists who held him hostage in Lebanon for nearly seven years, longer than any other Western hostage. He was released in 1991.

Once again, however, translating a legal victory into compensation proved difficult.

Anderson’s lawyers served former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers with papers in an attempt to retrieve part of the award from a fund holding frozen Iranian assets dating back to the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and 52 American hostages.

But those funds are tied up in legal proceedings in The Hague between Iran and the U.S. over assets and disputes up through the end of the hostage ordeal in 1981.

In one of its final acts last year, Congress passed another law to settle these disputes. The law opened the way for the U.S. government to settle the claims by paying part of the awards--on the theory that someday it will be able to retrieve the funds from Iran.

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