Veteran Terrorist Hunters Say US Vulnerable to Attack

by Anthony L. Kimery

'The intelligence from my perspective is pretty clear in so far as what Al Qaeda’s intentions are' must read When former Vice President Dick Cheney earlier this week said there’s a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack and implied that Obama administration policies have weakened the Intelligence Community to the extent that it might now be impossible to detect such an attack, it made a lot of observers wince on the left and right. Veteran US counterterror officials HSToday.us spoke to said while intelligence capabilities under the Obama administration aren’t currently likely to be as deficient or as policy-unwise as Cheney implied, there certainly are crisis-level vulnerabilities on the home-front that Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations bent on seriously doing damage to the United States could strike at which could deliver a devastating blow during the next 12 to 24 months while the government attempts to rescue the nation from its weakened economy. The US’s seriously destabilized economy—which is at least as bad as it’s been in 30 years—has opened a fissure in the nation’s vulnerability to a catastrophic terrorist attack that potentially could in fact economically cripple the nation, the counterterrorists believe. Given that Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups desire to strike at America’s economic stability, a catastrophic attack or attacks across the nation anytime soon would certainly contribute in a big way to the nation’s existing downward spiral, the officials said. “And Al Qaeda has to be looking at this as an opportunity … looking at every which way they can possibly pull off a spectacular attack,” one of the officials said. Continuing, the official said, “imagine 9/11s in every major city. We’re still facing a very real threat—it has not diminished, and I’m quite sure President Obama and his senior national security advisors understand this since they’ve been privileged to see the actual intelligence that lays it all out; at least I hope they do. If they don’t, then someone needs to get them up to speed. But I’m sure they do.” The counterterror experts pointed to the recent undeniable exposure of the gross deficiencies in the federal government being able to swiftly detect and immediately halt distribution of food borne pathogens as an “example of one of the many vulnerabilities” in homeland security through which terrorists could launch a biological attack. Speaking at a recent Washington Institute Special Policy Forum, Ken Wainstein, former assistant to President Bush for homeland security and counterterrorism, stressed that the gravest terrorism threat from “terrorist organizations [is their acquiring] weapons of mass destruction and [using] them against us, our homeland, or our allies.” “Biological weapons are the most likely” terrorist WMD threat right now,” agreed Charles "Sam" Faddis, a 20-year veteran CIA officer who was a National Counterterrorism Center department chief overseeing “worldwide operations against the terrorist WMD target” when he retired from the clandestine services last May. Faddis earlier told HSToday.us that, yes, terrorists are probably more likely to try to use biological weapons in the near future, noting that such an attack would “be devastating and it would totally cause catastrophic casualties.” “And there are other vulnerabilities” that could be exploited to carry out a catastrophic attack, one of the counterterror officials said. Rejecting notions by some former IC counterterrorists that Al Qaeda for whatever reason is unwilling to try to attack the US directly again, the officials HSToday.us talked to said they do not necessarily “buy into that line of thinking.” “The intelligence from my perspective is pretty clear in so far as what Al Qaeda’s intentions are—make no mistake about that,” one said, pointing to Cheney’s remarks in his interview this week about planned attacks that were stopped but the details about which remain classified. Cheney said he’s confident that the classified files on these thwarted attacks will some day be made public and will prove that significant planned attacks were halted. “The fact is there have been attacks in the works we’ve learned about that we’ve managed to stop,” the official told HSToday.us, adding, “and Al Qaeda and its affiliates continue to work on plans to attack us.” While the counterterrorists split with Cheney on the efficacy of so-called “enhanced interrogations,” they agreed with him on the use of wide-ranging communications intercepts when there’s “clear-cut” intelligence that specific communications are related to terrorism. But the bottomline of what the officials said is that the crisis America finds itself in is and of itself a serious vulnerability that makes a concerted effort to pull off a catastrophic attack so attractive to terrorists. “Which means we still need to devote resources—sooner than later—to start plugging all the holes in security we know about,” one of the officials said.