We hear it all the time - some variant on the well-worn adage: “With Saddaam out of the way, America and the world are a safer place.”
But are we really? Living and working so close to Washington, D.C., I think all the time about how easy it would be for us to be attacked. I can only imagine how fragile our national psychological state would become if a series of Hamas-style suicide bombers began blowing up our crowded subway trains and city buses.
It wouldn’t take much - only a handful of such attacks would be devastating to a country that has suffered so few violations of its sovereignty, let alone its comfort and ignorant bliss.
And every time I read something like this, I remember that it’s only by some miracle that another September 11th-style attack hasn’t happened.
Two sets of confidential blueprints for the planned Freedom Tower, which is set to rise at Ground Zero, were carelessly dumped in a city garbage can on the corner of West Houston and Sullivan streets, The Post has learned.
Experts said the detailed, floor-by-floor schematics contain enough detail for terrorists to plot a devastating attack.
“Secure Document - Confidential,” warns the title page on each of the two copies of the 150-page schematic that a homeless, recovering drug addict discovered in the public trash can.
“Any time a sensitive document is unintentionally left behind, it’s a treasure trove for a potential adversary,” aid Robert Strang, CEO of Investigative Management Group, a global security firm. “It enables them to look for vulnerabilities in design that they can target - an age-old military tactic.”
Between open borders, sleeping or absent (or just plain stupid) TSA screeners, and this kind of nonsense, I really find myself wondering when it’s going to happen again. I’m obviously no advocate of a police state, but a heavy application of common sense might be appropriate here.
There are some ominous portents afoot. Cham E. Dallas, an expert on terrorism, mass destruction attacks, and response strategies at the University of Georgia, testified before Congress recently that we should expect a nuclear attack in a major U.S. city in the next 20 years:
A nuclear device detonated near the White House would kill roughly 100,000 people and flatten downtown federal buildings, while the radioactive plume from the explosion would likely spread toward the Capitol and into Southeast D.C., contaminating thousands more.
The blast from the 10-kiloton bomb — similar to the bomb dropped over Hiroshima during World War II — would kill up to one in 10 tourists visiting the Washington Monument and send shards of glass flying the length of the National Mall, in a scenario that has become increasingly likely to occur in a major U.S. city in recent years, panel members told a Senate committee yesterday.
“It’s inevitable,” said Cham E. Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia, who has charted the potential explosion’s effect in the District and testified before a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. “I think it’s wistful to think that it won’t happen by 20 years.”
Of course, it might not happen. But what’s to say that it won’t? If you’ve ever lived in a border state, or crossed back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico, you know that much of what protects us from foreign malcontents is little more than a shallow river, an easily breached fence, or an imaginary line.
Do you feel safer? Do you think the idea of some of Russia’s missing nuclear material falling into the wrong hands is too far fetched? What sort of response would a nuclear attack on America provoke if it came from an asymmetrical threat like Al Qaeda, where the Cold War stalemate of “Mutually Assured Destruction” can’t factor in because the network is dispersed across so many countries and America isn’t likely to bomb them all, if any?
These are tough questions, and we need to be asking them both individually and as a nation. On the individual level, I don’t know what to make of reports like this, or what to expect. Just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t.
