Editor's corner.

• Position: International terrorism - Brief Article - Editorial

On September 20, U.S. Ambassador Francis X. Taylor, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, was scheduled to host a briefing on the subject of "Countering the Terrorist Threat." The invitation to the briefing said: "Recent terrorist attacks have cost American lives, threatened U.S. interests." Amb. Taylor was to discuss U.S. efforts to "deter and respond" to acts of terrorism.

The organizers of the briefing never would have predicted that only nine days before Amb. Taylor's scheduled presentation, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history would occur. On the morning of September 11, two hijacked commercial airliners crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, killing thousands of innocent people. An hour later, another plane smashed into the Pentagon, resulting in many more casualties.

Not including the victims from these recent attacks, the FBI estimated that, since 1968, 14,000 international terrorist attacks have caused more than 10,000 deaths.

In the aftermath of the horrific events of September 11, U.S. government officials are scrambling to come up with answers: Who did this? Why? How can these attacks be prevented in the future?

The 1983 bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 service members, prompted a slew of new programs and federal funding for anti-terrorism efforts. But, in the years since, U.S. government funding for anti-terrorist research programs has been erratic. Since 1983, U.S. citizens have seen more terrorist attacks: the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City; the bombing of Air Force barracks in Khobar Towers, Saudi Arabia; the truck-bomb in Oklahoma City in 1995; the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dat es Salaam, Tanzania, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen last year.

The push within Congress and the Executive Branch to invest more federal money in homeland defense began in earnest after the 1995 terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City. But, as National Defense contributing author John Stanton wrote in our February 2001 edition: "Little has been done to make the American public feel any more confident than it was five years ago in the nation's...