Everything Old Is New Again

The same problems with security that we are facing were envisioned in the 1970s during the Nixon administration.

Following the slaughter of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, a committee was formed to assess and manage risk.

"Unless governments take basic precautions, we will continue to stand at the edge of an awful abyss," Robert Kupperman, chief scientist for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, wrote in a 1977 report that summarized nearly five years of work by the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism.

The full committee that met only once in October 1972, included such figures as Henry Kissinger and Rudi Giuliani. It’s experts did get together twice a month for nearly five years to identify threats and debate solutions.

"It is vital that we take every possible action ourselves and in concert with other nations designed to assure against acts of terrorism," Nixon wrote in asking his secretary of state, William Rogers, to oversee the task force.

"It is equally important that we be prepared to act quickly and effectively in the event that, despite all efforts at prevention, an act of terrorism occurs involving the United States, either at home or abroad," the president said.

But as we all know, interest in terrorism waned after Watergate. Bureaucratic turf wars took their toll and the rest is history.

What is chilling is the fact that neither governments nor industry, or even the U.N. wanted to take responsibility especially since doing so would cost millions of dollars. We are paying the price for those decisions today.

The proposals that were made in the 1970s are the shockingly familiar. The task force:

- discussed defending commercial aircraft against being shot down by portable missile systems;

- recommended improved vigilance at potential "soft" targets, such as major holiday events, municipal water supplies, nuclear power plants and electric power facilities;

- supported cracking down on foreigners living in and traveling through the United States, with particular attention to Middle Easterners and Arab-Americans;

- developed plans to protect U.S. diplomats and businessmen working abroad against kidnapping and attack.

Though the CIA routinely updated the committee on potential terrorist threats and plots, task force members learned quickly that intelligence gathering and coordination was a weak spot, just as Bush would discover three decades later.

Read about the shocking negligence.