Home-based terrorists are currently inside the United States and are looking to strike targets here and abroad, the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said in a speech last night.
“Home-based terrorism is here. And like violent extremism abroad, it is now part of the threat picture that we must confront,” Napolitano told the America-Israel Friendship League in New York City, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press release.
Spencer S. Hsu of The Washington Post called Napolitano's statements last night her "bluntest assessments yet of terror threats within the country" a night after President Obama announced he will send an additional 30,000 U.S. service members to Afghanistan to fight Taliban militants and al Qaeda terrorists in an effort to stabilize the war-torn country.
According to Hsu, Napolitano listed two recent cases to support her statement that jihadist radicalization has gained traction inside the United States. Napolitano cited the case of Najibullah Zazi, a Denver airport shuttle driver arrested in September after allegedly training with al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
Zazi allegedly tested homemade bombs, styled after those used in the 2004 Madrid transit bombings, before driving cross-country to New York from Denver. He faces charges of conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction.
Separately, U.S. prosecutors in October accused David C. Headley, a Chicago businessman, of conspiring with members of Lashkar-i-Taiba, an extremist Islamic group in Pakistan allied with al-Qaeda, to plot attacks in Denmark and India. It's a thesis also put forward recently by terrorism expert Peter Bergen, a fellow at The New America Foundation, after the alleged shooting rampage of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed 12 soldiers and one civilian.
Surveying the many foiled terrorism plots over the past few years, Bergen concludes:
The constellation of terrorism cases that surfaced during the second Bush term and during Obama's first year in office suggests that a small minority of American Muslims are not immune to the al Qaeda ideological virus. And quite a number of those terrorism cases were more operational than aspirational, unlike many of the domestic terror cases that had preceded them after 9/11. The jihadists in these cases were not just talking about violent acts to a government informant but had actually traveled to an al Qaeda training camp; fought in an overseas jihad; purchased guns or explosives; cased targets; and, in a couple of the cases, actually killed Americans.
According to the DHS press release, Napolitano also spoke about DHS' commitment to sharing information with its federal, state, local, and tribal partners through fusion centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
The secretary's speech last night was the second in two days that explored the threat of domestic terrorism. Two days ago, Napolitano outlined the threat of terrorists using improvised explosive devices on U.S. soil at Interagency Council for Applied Homeland Security Technology's Counter-IED Symposium.
Bioweapons could catch U.S. cities off guard (False Flag Operation Number 2)
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — If America’s less-than-rapid response to the H1N1 pandemic is an indicator of how the U.S. public health system would react in the event of a bioweapon attack, we are in deep, deep yogurt, folks.
It’s taken more than six months to ramp up production of a vaccine for a contagious disease that health officials worldwide knew was coming.
Fort Worth parents remember all too well the late April decision by school district officials to close all 144 local campuses for more than a week because of concerns about the spread of swine flu.
Wouldn’t it have made sense to vaccinate children against H1N1 before school started this fall?
"Sure it would have," said retired Air Force Col. Randall Larsen, executive director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism and author of Our Own Worst Enemy. "But there’s a problem. There’s [just] one facility in the United States making H1N1 vaccine, and it’s using the same technology we used 50 years ago."
Inoculating eggs — produced at the 35 U.S. chicken farms operated with the sole purpose of vaccine production — with a virus that then creates hundreds of thousands of copies of itself is Cold-War technology.
The efficiency of the virus replication determines how much and how fast vaccine can be produced. In the case of the H1N1 vaccine, reproduction was "sluggish," admitted Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in an Oct. 28 news conference.
The nation’s lack of progress in moving to cell-based vaccine technology — which would cut production time from about 23 weeks to between 12 and 14 weeks and produce more vaccine — should be a concern to every American who has given so much as a nanosecond of thought about the country’s ability to recover from a bioweapons attack. Because preventing such an incident is nigh on impossible.
"It is hard to have a preventive policy for bioterrorism because of the vast variety of agents available," said retired Maj. Gen. John Parker, the former commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command at Fort Detrick, to journalists participating in a seminar last week on the WMD threat and America’s communities sponsored by the Heritage and El Pomar foundations.
A December 2008 report issued by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism concluded that terrorists will be more likely to use a biological weapon than a nuclear one in a future attack on the United States.
As disquieting as it is to hear, the materials to construct a bioweapon aren’t difficult to obtain, even in a post-9-11 world. The level of technological expertise needed to manufacture a bioweapon isn’t high, said the World At Risk report.
And the materials needed to make such a weapon aren’t all closely monitored. Many of the pathogens are readily available — in nature, in sick people and in laboratories. The key to mitigating the long-term terrorism value of a bioweapon is rapid response, recognition and recovery — and recovery includes having therapeutics available ASAP for those exposed and vaccines to prevent the spread.
"The point of terrorism is not just to claim victims but to terrorize everyone around them," said Cliff May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an adviser to the Baker-Hamilton Commission of the U.S. Institute of Peace. The impact of a dirty bomb or a biological weapon going off somewhere in the United States wouldn’t be confined to the number of people killed or exposed to the pathogen or radiological agent, he said.
"The psychological and economic effects would be far greater than the initial public health threat," May said. As Larsen concludes in his book, terrorists will again attack the United States. The appropriate reaction, he wrote, "should be shock, but not surprise.
"Americans will always be shocked when ruthless, immoral cowards intentionally kill innocents, but we can no longer justify being surprised."
My Models
