Terrorism is war and it’s time for the United States and other democratic countries to treat the growing incidence of terrorist attacks as acts of war, a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency said here.
Speaking at a news conference on international and domestic terrorism — its history and its future — Dr. Ray Cline, former deputy director for intelligence of the CIA, said that terrorist acts such as last week’s hijacking of the Kuwaiti airliner call for strong responses.
The news conference, held Friday at the national headquarters of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, was cosponsored by ADL and the Institute for Studies in International Terrorism at the State University of New York.
Opening the conference, Abraham Foxman, ADL’s associate national director and head of the International Affairs Division, stressed the agency’s long concern about the threat that “terrorism rampant” could pose to Western civilization. “As an organization dedicated to fostering human relations, we recognized early that a world intimidated by terrorists would not be conducive to enhancing relations between people,” he declared.
Other speakers were Dr. Yonah Alexander, director of the Institute, Kenneth Walter, deputy assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York, and Allan Gerson, special assistant to Jeane Kirkpatrick, United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
SAYS APPROPRIATE MEASURES MUST BE USED
Noting that even the United Nations Charter upholds the principle of self-defense, Cline, now a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, warned that appropriate measures must be used to meet state-supported terrorism.
Asked to spell out his ideas on appropriate measures for the current Kuwaiti airliner crisis, Cline cited mobilizing the involved nations, pressuring the Iranian government to cooperate, the imposition of meaningful sanctions and punishment for the perpetrators. “If our reactions are lackadaisical,” he cautioned, “we will have lost the war.”
Cline called for an intensive campaign by the U.S. and other democratic countries to educate the public that the terrorist acts of the last 15 years aren’t accidental and unrelated phenomena but are instead part of a distinct and carefully planned trend engineered by the Soviet Union and its client states, including Syria, Libya and Cuba.
1984 MAY BE BLOODIEST YEAR EVER
Alexander told the conference that fatalities from terrorist attacks have increased 20 percent annually in the last decade. The current year promises to be the bloodiest ever, he predicted, reporting that there was a total of 2,645 incidents in 1983 compared to 2,838 in just the first nine months of this year.
Walton pinpointed the terrorist coalition operating in the United States, naming the Weathermen, the Republic of New Africa, the United Freedom Front, the Black Liberation Army and the FALN among the groups working together.
The lines of the coalition providing funds, safe house and other aid, the FBI official reported, stretch from New England through Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey to Georgia and Louisiana and finally to Texas. Interconnecting links have been established, he said, between the 1981 Brinks robbery and other terrorist attacks, all leading back to the theft in a single day of explosive devices at a construction site in Austin, Texas.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
