Rescue workers carry a woman over the rubble of a building destroyed during the terrorist bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya in August 1998. (AP/Wide World)

Moreover, Crowe, a former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, repeated his defense of the Review Boards' recommendation to spend some $14 billion over the next decade to enhance the safety of all Embassies and other overseas installations. "We were told that this would be a dead issue in six months," Crowe said, commenting on anticipated congressional resistance to the cost of security reforms. "It's a shame to have the budget controlling lives."

Ambassador Philip C. Wilcox, Jr., former Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism at the State Department and a member of one of the Accountability Boards, noted that there have been more than 200 attacks on U.S. missions and diplomatic personnel in the past 12 years. Against this backdrop, the embassy bombings were a surprise. "We've had experience with such attacks," he said, "but our memories were short. The gravity of these attacks has prompted a strong sense in the Department of State to do more to protect Americans serving their country abroad."

"We've lost more Ambassadors since World War Two than we have Admirals and Generals," Admiral Crowe added, stressing the impact of the terrorist threat on U.S. officials overseas.

Other panel members included international security consultant and renown terrorism expert Brian Jenkins and Gideon Rose, the Olin Fellow in National Security at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Jenkins noted that the threat posed to American installations abroad by truck bombs was understood 14 years ago, when a similar Commission led by Admiral Bobby Inman investigated the embassy bombings in Beirut and Kuwait. "It was unimaginable to see that 14 years later our security plans did not address transnational terrorism or the threat posed by large vehicular bombs,"Jenkins said. He noted that while the volume of international terrorism has decreased in recent years, the frequency and scope of such attacks remained a serious source of concern. "If the future is not worst than the past," he argued, "we should expect an attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility every four years."

Citing a recently released report by the Department of State on reforms adopted following the bombings, Gideon Rose noted that the terrorism in its modern form is not unlike that faced during the past century. The tragedy of the African embassy bombings would only be compounded "if other aspects of our foreign policy were gutted, resulting in a retrenchment of U.S. activity and influence abroad."

Rose also addressed the effectiveness of U.S. military retaliation in the aftermath of the embassy bombings. "The U.S. response to terrorism must be seen as a just response," Rose argued. "In Sudan, our action was not as clear as we hoped it would be. Ultimately, we hurt ourselves and our credibility."

The presentations were followed by questions from the floor.

For more information on this Current Issues Briefing, or the Institute's work on political violence and terrorism, please contact Dr. Patrick Cronin, Director of Research and Studies, which co-sponsored the briefing with the help of the Institute's Office of Communications.