|
In responding to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, America has entered into a new type of war, one fought in the shadows.
美国在对纽约和华盛顿遭受恐怖袭击作出反应之时，便进入了一种新型的战争，一种在暗中进行的战争。
Journey into the Shadows
Mark Hosenball, Michael Hirsh and Ron Moreau
1 It was the usual transatlantic flight: nine hours of fidgeting to get the pillow right, first-run movies flickering mutely on small screens, an indigestible flow of starchy food and drinks. Bound for Chicago from Zurich on the morning of May 8, the passengers of Swiss International Air Lines Flight 8 saw nothing amiss. Certainly they didn't know they were on the front lines of a global war being waged under their drooping eyes. But the crew knew it.
走向隐密
马克·霍森鲍尔 迈克尔·赫什 罗恩·莫罗
那是一次寻常的飞越大西洋的航班：整整9个小时头不停地在靠垫上移来移去，想枕得舒服些，小屏幕上首轮影片的无声镜头抖动着，多得无法消化的淀粉食物及饮料。5月8日上午，在从苏黎世飞往芝加哥的客机上，乘坐瑞士国际航空公司第8次航班的乘客没有丝毫异样感觉。当然，他们不知道，就在睡眼惺忪之际，自己竟处在了一场正在进行的全球战争的第一线。然而，机组人员是知道的。
2 They had been warned that a major terrorist suspect was scheduled to fly on the plane. And a scattering of very wakeful men in nearby seats knew it: a small squad of FBI agents and a separate team of Swiss Special Forces commandos, all carefully positioned around the suspect, all warily watching his every move. For nine hours.
他们接到警报，一个重要的恐怖分子嫌犯预定乘坐这架班机。散坐在近旁座位上那些高度警觉的人是知道的：那是一小队联邦调查局的特工人员和另一队瑞士特别部队的突击队员，他们被精心安排在嫌犯四周，密切监视其一举一动。整整9个小时。
3 (1) This airborne stakeout was directed at one Jose Padilla, otherwise known as Abdullah al-Muhajir, a Brooklyn-born street thug now identified by investigators as a would-be Qaeda terrorist. After moving mysteriously for a month from Karachi to Zurich to Cairo and back to Zurich -- the kind of city-hopping we've come to associate with a Qaeda plot -- Padilla was headed back to his homeland to cause havoc, or possibly just scout out a good target, U.S. authorities believe. Padilla was one of the band of foreign terrorists who, as the Taliban fell late last year, had escaped into Pakistan with Abu Zubaydah, a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden. (2) Tipped off by Zubaydah -- who was arrested in Pakistan in late March and has since been relentlessly interrogated in a top-secret location -- authorities had recently connected a fresh pair of very alarming dots: they had pieced Padilla's name together with vague allegations from Zubaydah about a "dirty bomb" plot, possibly aimed at Washington, D.C. Even so, the Feds were lucky. Though Padilla came to their attention back in March, U.S. intelligence officials say they did not realize how dangerous he was until weeks after he took off on his trip, and for more than a month they had no firm fix on his whereabouts. Only a last-minute search of itineraries of thousands of passengers known to be traveling toward the United States had turned up Padilla's name -- less than 48 hours before his flight to Chicago.
这一空中监控是针对一个叫何塞·帕迪拉，又名阿卜杜拉·阿勒·穆哈季尔的人，一个布鲁克林出生的街头流氓，调查人员认定他是潜在的基地组织的恐怖分子。一个月内，他诡密地出没在卡拉奇、苏黎世、开罗等城市，后又在苏黎世现身――这种在国际城市间飞来飞去的情况，我们常与基地组织的阴谋联系在一起――美国当局相信帕迪拉是要回国制造混乱，也可能仅仅是在寻找袭击目标。帕迪拉是国外恐怖组织的成员，塔利班去年底垮台后，他跟随本·拉登的高级副手阿卜·祖巴伊达窜逃至巴基斯坦。根据3月底在巴基斯坦被捕，并在一个高度机密的地点受到长时间严刑审讯的祖巴伊达提供的情况，当局近来将一组极其惊人的新的情况联系在一起：他们将帕迪拉的名字与祖巴伊达含糊提到的一项可能以华盛顿为攻击目标的脏弹计划联系在一起。即便如此，联邦调查局仍算侥幸。虽然帕迪拉自3月以来就引起了他们的注意，美国情报官员说他们直到他起程之后的几个星期里才意识到他是多么危险，在一个多月的时间内，他们不知道他的确切行踪。直到在对成千上万个前往美国的乘客的旅行路线进行最后一刻核查时才找到了帕迪拉的名字――这时离他登上前往芝加哥的班机不到48小时。
4 FBI bomb and hazardous-materials specialists had been deployed to O'Hare to await Padilla's arrival. But the landing at O'Hare International Airport at 1:30 p.m. was as uneventful as the plane ride. Once in, Padilla was whisked away to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, the high-rise federal prison a few blocks from Ground Zero.
于是联邦调查局炸弹及危险物品专家被派往奥海厄机场等候帕迪拉的到来。不过像整个飞行过程一样，下午1：30飞机在奥海厄国际机场降落时波澜不惊。一进汽车，帕迪拉就被风驰电掣般地押送至坐落在曼哈顿的大都会拘留中心，即距9·11事件现场仅几个街区之遥的高层联邦监狱。
5 WAR IN THE SHADOWS 隐密的战争
6 The story of Padilla's quiet capture is the best evidence yet that the war against Al Qaeda has entered an entirely new phase. If the war began dramatically, with planes crashing into buildings and the Taliban fleeing Afghanistan, it is now mostly underground -- waged by terrorists, spooks, paramilitaries and G-men. "We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge," Bush told West Point graduates a few weeks ago. Many commentators thought he was talking about pre-emptively striking future foes like Iraq. But Bush was also putting a new emphasis on covert operations, which has raised fresh concerns about civil liberties. How far is America veering toward police-state tactics? "We shouldn't deceive ourselves. This is not a defensive game," says Jack Devine, a former CIA associate deputy operations director. "If we seal our ports, they're going to come across the Rio Grande, or from Canada. The truth is that [with new homeland security] we'll improve defensively by maybe 7 percent or 10 percent. The best hope we have is to go after and destroy the terrorist organization."
帕迪拉被悄悄抓获是迄今最好的证据，说明反基地组织的战争进入了一个崭新的阶段。如果说战争开始时颇具戏剧性，如飞机撞入高楼、塔利班逃离阿富汗，那么现在战争主要在地下进行――参与作战的是恐怖主义分子、间谍、准军事部队成员以及联邦调查局人员。“我们必须向敌人发起进攻，挫败其计划，在最可怕的威胁出现之前就勇敢地面对它们，”几个星期前布什对西点军校的毕业生说。许多评论员认为，他指的是要对伊拉克那样未来的敌人进行先发制人的打击。但布什同时重新强调秘密行动，这引起了对公民自由权利的新的关注。美国将在多大程度上转而采取警察国家的策略？“我们不应该自己欺骗自己。这并非防御方针，”前中央情报局行动处副处长杰克·迪瓦恩说。“如果我们封锁港口，他们可以从格兰德河，或加拿大进入。事实是，（有了新成立的国土安全局）我们的防御能力也许会提高7%到10%。我们最好的希望还是主动追逐并摧毁恐怖组织。”
7 What was Padilla's real plan, and how far along was it? Perhaps the endless interrogation he is now undergoing will tell. What American officials at O'Hare didn't do -- but were tempted to -- was to tail Padilla once he landed to see whom he was meeting. (3) Nervous after a torrent of criticism over other lost suspects -- principally the hijackers of September 11 -- the FBI decided he was too dangerous to take a chance with. As a result, U.S. officials say, they simply do not know whether Padilla was a lone wolf, or had a network of confederates in America. And if there is a nationwide manhunt for any accomplices, that, too, is taking place off the radar. All of which points up the main problem with conducting a secret war: it's difficult to tell who's winning.
帕迪拉的真正计划是什么，这个计划已经执行到什么程度？他正在接受的没完没了的审讯或许会告诉我们。奥海厄机场的美国官员没有做――但很想一试--的是，帕迪拉一下飞机就跟踪他，看他与谁接头。然而，由于因其他嫌犯成功逃逸――主要指那些9·11的劫机者――而受到一连串批评的联邦调查局，这时已十分紧张，认定帕迪拉太危险，不愿再冒丢失的风险。美国官员说，结果，他们根本不知道帕迪拉到底是单枪匹马，还是在美国有一伙同党。如果在全国搜查同党的话，那也无异于大海捞针。这一切都突出地反映了进行秘密战争的主要难题：胜负难定。
8 Sometimes not even the Feds know what the tally is -- which doesn't bode well for the new spirit of intelligence cooperation in Washington. Just before Padilla's flight, some American intelligence officials back in Washington became alarmed when they noticed that an abnormally large number of Swiss and U.S. passengers had booked last-minute passage on the same plane: it took a while for word to get through to the analysts that the last-minute passengers were the Swiss and FBI teams tailing the suspect. Even the White House, Pentagon and Justice Department couldn't seem to agree on what kind of threat Padilla posed. When Attorney General John Ashcroft announced portentously that Padilla was plotting a radiological bomb attack, White House officials scoffed privately; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz countered that the "plot" was mostly still talk.
有时连联邦调查局调查员也不知道目标在何处，这对华盛顿情报合作的新精神而言并非好的预兆。就在帕迪拉搭乘的班机起飞前，华盛顿的一些美国情报官员非常震惊，因为他们注意到，一大批瑞士及美国乘客在起飞前最后一刻订了同一次航班的票：过了一些时间这些分析家才接到消息，这些临时乘客正是跟踪嫌犯的瑞士和联邦调查局工作小组。甚至连白宫、五角大楼和司法部也对帕迪拉究竟会构成什么威胁存在意见分歧。当司法部长约翰·阿什克劳夫特矜持地宣布帕迪拉正在策划放射性炸弹袭击时，白宫的官员在私下里嗤之以鼻；副国防部长保罗·沃尔福威茨反驳说，所谓“策划”主要的还只是传闻。
9 There are other worrisome signs that terror could prove more slippery even than U.S. tactics to contain it. Late last week FBI agents were running down a warning from Canadian intelligence that Qaeda operatives might be targeting the G8 summit in Canada later this month. Last Friday, at the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, the fortified building's guardhouse was struck by a car bomb that killed at least 11 people. The attack was strikingly similar to a suspected Qaeda strike on a Pakistani naval bus in May, which slaughtered 14 people, including 11 French naval technicians. The surviving suspects slipped away. Despite a crackdown in Pakistan, its cities remain hosts and seedbeds for radicals. And while terrorists no longer have a haven in Afghanistan, they're now forming what one intelligence official calls "virtual training camps" on the Web. For the last two months, individuals in a U.S.-based Internet chat room have been frantically conversing, clearly wanting and planning to attack the United States, law-enforcement authorities say. At least one chat-room participant was asked if he could speak Spanish, since terrorist recruiters are looking for Arabs or other Muslims who "look Latin" and speak Spanish "to infiltrate the U.S."(4) All we can be sure of today is that they have one fewer recruit in Jose Padilla.
其他令人不安的迹象表明，恐怖活动可能比美国战术所能遏制的要棘手。上周晚些时候，联邦调查局特工在追查来自加拿大情报部门的一个警报，基地活动分子可能要袭击本月下旬在加拿大举行的八国峰会。上周五，在卡拉奇的美国领事馆，设防的大楼警卫队队部遭受汽车炸弹的袭击，造成至少11人死亡。这次袭击与5月份时怀疑是基地组织发起的对巴基斯坦一辆海军汽车的袭击有着惊人的相似之处，那次袭击造成14人死亡，包括11名法国海军技术人员。尚活着的疑犯溜走了。尽管在巴基斯坦开展了打击活动，各城市仍活跃着并产生出狂热分子。在阿富汗，恐怖主义者的确不再拥有庇护所，但现在他们在因特网上组织一位情报官员所谓的“虚拟培训营”。执法当局说，在最近两个月，美国一个因特网聊天室的参与者一直在发狂似地交谈，很明显要计划袭击美国。至少有一个参与聊天的人被问到会不会说西班牙语，因为招募恐怖分子的人在找长得像南美人、会说西班牙语的阿拉伯人或其他穆斯林，以便让他们“渗入美国”。今天我们所能肯定的仅仅是，他们损失了一个新成员何塞·帕迪拉。
|