NEWSWEEK COVER: Terror Now

NEW YORK, Aug. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Five years after 9/11, President Bush's advisers say they have learned a great deal about how to fight a war on terror, and they are no doubt correct. In the August 21-28 cover, "Terror Now," (on newsstands Monday, August 14), Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas, with a team of Newsweek correspondents, sift through the investigation in Britain of the terror attack that was to bring down 10 airliners and also examine the lessons learned since 9/11 in the global war on terror.

Bush has apparently learned not to overreact. In the panicky days after the September 11 attacks, the president wanted to see any scrap of information, no matter how thinly sourced. As a result, raw and unfiltered intelligence gushed into the Oval Office. In one instance, authorities in Pennsylvania received a frightening tip from an FBI office overseas that terrorists had a nuclear device on a train somewhere between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The report went straight to the White House, where the president was anxiously consuming threat traffic like a midlevel CIA analyst. The information turned out to be bogus. Within a day it had been traced back to a conversation between two men overheard at a urinal in Ukraine.

That incident contrasts with the more measured approach Bush took when informed of the terror plot investigation thwarted this week by British officials. As British intelligence was closely tracking the plot over several months, Bush was kept only loosely in the loop, Newsweek reports. At a briefing on Aug. 3, "he was basically told, 'This is happening and you should know about it, but we don't have a lot of details yet'," says a senior White House aide who asked to remain anonymous discussing intelligence briefings. "This shows how we're better equipped to fight the enemy now," Fran Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland-security adviser, tells Newsweek. "We're seeing levels of cooperation between the FBI, CIA, and the NSA we didn't see before. Nobody was trying to hide the ball." Outside experts and former officials remain skeptical.

Last week, Bush tried to reassure Americans that they are safer than they were before the attacks. At the same time, his vice president, Dick Cheney, darkly warned that the Connecticut Primary victory of antiwar candidate Ned Lamont over Sen. Joseph Lieberman would only encourage "Al Qaeda types." (Interviewed by Newsweek, former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge bridled at his former colleague's remark: "That may be the way the vice president sees it," he said, "but I don't see it that way, and I don't think most Americans see it that way.")

The good news for Western intelligence is that an expanding and diversifying Al Qaeda may be easier for a spy to penetrate than the more tribal, insular Al Qaeda hierarchy of the late '90s, Newsweek reports. Of course, Iraq continues to be not only a recruiting ground but also a training base for future terrorists. A U.S. intelligence official in Baghdad, who talked to Newsweek anonymously because he is barred from speaking to the press on sensitive matters, said: "When we first rolled in here, we weren't even human, they were [so] scared of us. But now they realize there's nothing special about [U.S. forces]-they're just human." Overnight, says this official, "we tripled the size of Al Qaeda" while radicalizing the Muslim world. "Let's say that 90 percent of world sympathy was with us back then [9/11]. When we crossed the border, there was another great pause, then a transfer of sympathy, and those that were on the fence jumped over. The entire Islamic world took a step to the right." This official has reluctantly concluded that the United States has to quicken the transfer of power to the Iraqis and leave the country.

That would be a disaster, argues Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad in an interview with Newsweek. "If we were to get out, what would you have? Certainly, it's very plausible that [Al Qaeda] could take over part of Iraq." He warns that Iraq could become like Afghanistan pre-9/11. "Now that we're here," said the ambassador, "losing Iraq would put the region and the world at greater risk from Al Qaeda."

Also in the cover package, General Editor Jonathan Darman reports on the political fallout of the Connecticut primary and how both political parties are gearing up to use that and the terror plot to their advantage. Now GOP candidates across the country who have feared the mention of combat on the campaign trail are embracing it once again-hoping that one last time, Americans will come to see the conflict in Iraq as indivisible from the broader war on terror.

Democrats say the terror card won't work this time. "We've all become more sophisticated about this as we've seen the consequences in Iraq," says Jim Webb, the Reagan administration Navy secretary who's running as the Democratic Senate candidate in Virginia. Some Republicans are being less bashful in their embrace of Lieberman. Vets for Freedom, an independent group of veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, is launching a media campaign in support of Lieberman. Among the group's advisers are prominent Republicans: former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.

(Read entire cover package at http://www.newsweek.com/)

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