Joined
·
4,133 Posts
As reported in USNews & World Report:
Terror's Next Target?
More than five years after 9/11, a frightening inside look at why we are still terribly vulnerable
By Stephen Flynn
Posted Sunday, February 11, 2007
Retired U.S. Coast Guard officer Stephen Flynn is a prominent homeland-security expert and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He frequently testifies before Congress on port- and border-security issues and authored the bestselling book, America the Vulnerable, in 2004. He also served as an adviser to the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, a task force led by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman that issued seminal reports on terrorism, including one just before 9/11. In a new book, The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation, Flynn argues that ailing infrastructure like weakened dams, levees, and power grids-as well as America's underinvestment in homeland security-makes the country susceptible to a catastrophe that could kill thousands.
CONSIDER THIS. It's a warm Friday evening in June, and nearly 40,000 baseball fans are gathered at Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park to watch the home team play the New York Mets. Most of the stadium's 21,000 parking spaces are filled, and, just a few hundred yards away, Interstate 95 is crowded with travelers heading for Atlantic City and the Jersey Shore. Just 2 miles due west, workers on the night shift are arriving at the 1,000-acre Sunoco oil refinery on the banks of the Schuylkill River. A light breeze is blowing toward the east-ideal conditions for a terrorist operation.
Three young men gather in a vacant lot in Camden, N.J., just across the Delaware River. The leader is a British national who spent much of 2004 in Iraq. Angered by the U.S. invasion, he traveled across Europe to Turkey and slipped into the country to join other insurgents. A second-generation Pakistani with a mechanical engineering degree, he received training in bomb-making from an Iranian tutor in Iraq and participated in two attacks on Iraqi oil refineries.
In the spring of 2005, a few months after returning home, the same man traveled to the United States. Having never run afoul of the law in England, his name was not on any terrorist watch list. Upon arrival, he answered the standard entry questions and was fingerprinted. With a letter of introduction from a radical British sheik, he found his way to a Jersey City mosque, where he met two Americans: an Egyptian college student recruited at a campus speaking event and the student's older cousin.
Working with a local imam, the Americans had hatched a plan to use a commercial tanker truck to target the Sunoco refinery. It's hardly a novel technique: Terrorists used a tanker truck in the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia on June 25, 1996, which killed 19 servicemen and wounded 372 people. In Iraq, trucks have been used in many suicide attacks, including the 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters.
Thousands of tanker trucks operate in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The older cousin holds a commercial trucker's license and an authorization from the Department of Homeland Security to carry hazardous materials, a certification available to almost anyone with no criminal record or history of being committed to a mental institution. He works as a driver for an independent gasoline distributor. His cousin, the student, is also an apprentice painter with one of the thousand contractors working on the Sunoco facility each day...
The full article can be found at; http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070211/19terror.htm
- Janq
Terror's Next Target?
More than five years after 9/11, a frightening inside look at why we are still terribly vulnerable
By Stephen Flynn
Posted Sunday, February 11, 2007
Retired U.S. Coast Guard officer Stephen Flynn is a prominent homeland-security expert and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He frequently testifies before Congress on port- and border-security issues and authored the bestselling book, America the Vulnerable, in 2004. He also served as an adviser to the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, a task force led by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman that issued seminal reports on terrorism, including one just before 9/11. In a new book, The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation, Flynn argues that ailing infrastructure like weakened dams, levees, and power grids-as well as America's underinvestment in homeland security-makes the country susceptible to a catastrophe that could kill thousands.
CONSIDER THIS. It's a warm Friday evening in June, and nearly 40,000 baseball fans are gathered at Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park to watch the home team play the New York Mets. Most of the stadium's 21,000 parking spaces are filled, and, just a few hundred yards away, Interstate 95 is crowded with travelers heading for Atlantic City and the Jersey Shore. Just 2 miles due west, workers on the night shift are arriving at the 1,000-acre Sunoco oil refinery on the banks of the Schuylkill River. A light breeze is blowing toward the east-ideal conditions for a terrorist operation.
Three young men gather in a vacant lot in Camden, N.J., just across the Delaware River. The leader is a British national who spent much of 2004 in Iraq. Angered by the U.S. invasion, he traveled across Europe to Turkey and slipped into the country to join other insurgents. A second-generation Pakistani with a mechanical engineering degree, he received training in bomb-making from an Iranian tutor in Iraq and participated in two attacks on Iraqi oil refineries.
In the spring of 2005, a few months after returning home, the same man traveled to the United States. Having never run afoul of the law in England, his name was not on any terrorist watch list. Upon arrival, he answered the standard entry questions and was fingerprinted. With a letter of introduction from a radical British sheik, he found his way to a Jersey City mosque, where he met two Americans: an Egyptian college student recruited at a campus speaking event and the student's older cousin.
Working with a local imam, the Americans had hatched a plan to use a commercial tanker truck to target the Sunoco refinery. It's hardly a novel technique: Terrorists used a tanker truck in the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia on June 25, 1996, which killed 19 servicemen and wounded 372 people. In Iraq, trucks have been used in many suicide attacks, including the 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters.
Thousands of tanker trucks operate in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The older cousin holds a commercial trucker's license and an authorization from the Department of Homeland Security to carry hazardous materials, a certification available to almost anyone with no criminal record or history of being committed to a mental institution. He works as a driver for an independent gasoline distributor. His cousin, the student, is also an apprentice painter with one of the thousand contractors working on the Sunoco facility each day...
The full article can be found at; http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070211/19terror.htm
- Janq
