Embassies at risk.

• Author: Hempstone, Smith
• Position: Terrorist attacks on US embassies in different countries

The last crushed bodies had scarcely been extricated from the car-bombed carnage of the American embassies in Dar es-Salaam and Nairobi when the cry went up to harden security at 280 U.S. diplomatic posts around the world, turning them into isolated bomb-proof fortresses impervious to terrorist attack.

Leading the first wave of the rhetorical charge, before the bodies of the American dead had reached these shores, were Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, and Bobby R. Inman, a retired admiral who was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Ronald Reagan.

After the American embassy in Beirut was car-bombed in 1983, killing sixteen people, Reagan named Inman to head a panel to recommend construction changes that would make U.S. diplomatic posts safer. The Inman Report, published in 1985, called for the hardening of embassies at a cost of $3.5 billion. But between 1986 and 1990, the State Department requested only $2.7 billion to enhance the security of its buildings, and less than a third of that - $880 million - was appropriated by Congress.

Resuscitating the Inman Report, which is basically what the security mongers want, is a bad idea. It would be expensive - probably costing $5 billion today - ineffective, and, in some cases, counterproductive.

The East African blasts of August 7 were powerful enough to kill over two hundred and fifty people and injure about five thousand others. Although U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Prudence Bushnell was slightly injured by flying glass, the great majority of the dead, wounded, and missing were Kenyans crowding the sidewalks or working in adjacent office buildings. Only thirty-five of the dead were within the embassies. More to the point, perhaps, as Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering put it, "There is no such thing as a bomb-proof building." Its "proof" is directly related to the size of the bomb.

The embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were built before the Inman Report was issued, and neither meets its specifications. The two principal recommendations of the report were that embassies should be surrounded by nine-foot walls, creating a "Fort Apache" school of diplomatic architecture, and that the buildings should be set back from the walls by at least one hundred feet. The latter provision would mean in many cases moving chanceries from downtown to the remote suburbs.

While both East African embassies had nine-foot walls, the...