Many questions need to be answered in the aftermath of the Okalahoma City bombing. As we surge forth with swords drawn, remember that the primary goal of such an attack is to generate a reaction which magnifies and distorts the power of the group responsible for the act.

In 1985, it was Alabama’s turn to be portrayed as a virtual nest of paramilitary activity. Air India Flight 182 with 329 people aboard instantly vaporized over the North Atlantic during a flight from London to Montreal. That bombing, coupled with an attempt to assassinate the prime minister of India during a visit to the United States, brought Frank Camper into the spotlight. He became the person with questionable motives out in the woods who was allegedly teaching everyone how to bring civilization one step closer to its demise.

Campers’s paramilitary activities and his training camp deep in America’s heartland were talked about for quite a while. They helped to spark a congressional decision to draft a single Omnibus Terrorism Act. However, the whole issue of paramilitary training was left virtually untouched. Congress even shelved the Prohibition Against Training or Support of Terrorist Organizations Act of 1984.

Now we move ahead to 1994. Germany had been calling attention to the unwelcome overtures of several unwanted American visitors who had come to Germany from the heartland of America to call for the reconstruction of the Fatherland months before the Oklahoma City bombing. What has been the Clinton administration’s response and involvement in the surveillance and even detainment of certain American Neo-Nazis in Europe lately? Is this related to a European money connection, possibly a black hole spewing forth vast sums for terrorist groups worldwide as noted by author Claire Sterling years ago and others?

“The Terror Network,” written by Sterling in 1982, shaped and mobilized the Reagan-era response to terrorism. Criticized by many for linking or attempting to link the KGB to every act of terrorism worldwide, Sterling’s book nontheless included a tantalizing thread. She noted but otherwise failed to focus upon the concept that deep in the heart of Europe is a financial enterprise which has been a source of funds for a wide range of terrorist organizations, everything from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to an intricate and deadly multinational web of neo-fascist organizations.

Why do we quickly accept the idea that what happened in Oklahoma City is the byproduct of a strictly homegrown phenomenon, after suddenly disbanding our instantaneous inclination to underatake a Shiite witch hunt, both here and abroad?

The Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 includes provisions to clamp down on domestic fund-raising and other support mechanisms which fuel terrorist enterprises. Why is nothing said about any European connection, or any BCCI-inspired visions of an international ATM for all terroist operations which target Israel and its allies? Or is it simply a myth, a product of Sterling’s imagination?

We touch on overseas activities and connections because somehow our erratic counterterrorism policy has displaced or eclipsed our counterintelligence policy. Are they one in the same? Doesn’t the FBI have enormous flexibility and leeway to pursue whatever leads might surface when a counterintelligence operation is under way?

In the process of examining this topic, we have to touch upon another very delicate sugject. This has to do with Israeli intelligence operations in the United States. The World Trade Center bombing is a case in point. A team of reporters from New York Newsday which covered that tragic event, for example, produced a book, “Two Seconds Under the World.” There, we learn that three months before the New York City bombing, Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, monitored activities at a mosque in New Jersey, and that the Mossad agents contacted the FBI in order to share information. In effect, the Mossad was waved off, according to the authors. It amounts to a couple of paragraphs in the book, and it leads nowhere. What else did the Mossad know? Much of what is written here stems from the uncertainty which surfaces in this part of the book.

What is the essence of the understanding between our FBI, and the Mossad? Where is the line drawn between the FBI’s counterterrorism mode and its counterintelligence mode? After all, aren’t American taxpayers paying a hefty sum to keep an Israeli spay named Jonathan Pollard behind bars? Yes, the Mossad is active in the United States and that is no secret. And yet, nobody is suggesting here that the presence of the Mossad or any of its contacts in Oklahoma City might have prevented the bombing there either.

Is there a Mossad presence in Oklahoma City as well as in other America cities? The answer appears to be yes, but why doesn’t Congress explore this issue and inform the American public accordingly?

In terms of counterintelligence, aren’t all contacts, sources and targets fair game as far as the FBI is concerned? Given the Mossad’s close scrutiny of all potentially threatening anti-Israeli groups here and elsewhere, and given its ability to penetrate almost any organization, couldn’t the FBI activate a very intrusive and parallel intelligence-gathering operation anywhere in the United States, shadowing the Mossad’s network? Isn’t the Mossad still permitted to carry out assassinations, and do those rules apply to the United States as well? It would be a difficult if not impossible task to track every Mossad agent in the United States; however, the emphasis here is on what is allowable under the existing FBI rules, and not on what might be burdensome, both in a political and operational sense.

What is the domestic counterintelligence angle leaving aisde the separate concerns of any domestic counterterrorism policy? Is the state-sponsorship of terrorism, long accepted as influencing U.S. foreign policy, part of the FBI’s counterintelligence rulebook? What is the impact of the FBI’s expansion overseas and how does it alter the CIA’s traditional responsibility with respect to intelligence gathering and terrorism?

More FBI manpower might help to detect some planned strike before it occurs — every federal law enforcement agency would probably welcome more manpower — and yet terrorist groups and tactics do not evolve in a vacuum. They change with the circumstances they confront. However, many Americans want no part of any growing federal apparatus, except perhaps for a bigger Border Patrol. Many Americans want the federal government to shrink rather than to expand.

Before we start the next phase in our domestic counterterrorism campaign, we better sit back and take a real hard look at what has brought us to this point. The American people have been given only a limited version of the whole story. The activities of certain Americans overseas, the money trail, and the extent and nature of the Mossad’s activities in the United States, as just a few of the gray areas in this regard.

A decade agao, we were just as vulnerable to terrorist attacks as we are now, and yet hundreds of these events were taking place each year. That sense of vulnerability remains today, and the threat is everchanging. Many countries around the world are being torn apart by violent acts. We need to be resourceful, and mindful of our unique status and the uncertainties of everyday life. We should not allow our response to the tragedy in Oklahoma City to become an end in itself. We should not confuse the wheels of justice with the wheels of policy-making. The nature of the response to always the key in these situations.

Peter J. Brown is a free-lance writer from Mount Desert.