Credible and serious?
Some officials appear to think that the US faces some near term terrorism dangers, as we alluded to previously. Retired Vice Admiral John Scott Redd, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, was interviewed somewhat raggedly by MSNBC, judging by the transcript. The interview could have been more informative perhaps if the reporters let the man finish his thoughts. Nonetheless, the basic points are pretty clear:
We’ve got this intelligence threat; we’re pretty certain we know what’s going on. We don’t have all the tactical details about it, [but] in some ways it’s not unlike the U.K. aviation threat last year…
So we know there is a threat out there. The question is, what do we do about it? And the response was, we stood up an interagency task force under NCTC leadership. So you have all the players you would expect: FBI, CIA, DHS, DIA, DoD, the operators—the military side comes into that—participating in an integrated plan, but integrated in a much more granular and tactical way than we’ve ever done before. This is my 40th year in government service, 36 in uniform and almost four as a civilian. This is revolutionary stuff, and it is affecting the way we do business….
We have very strong indicators that Al Qaeda is planning to attack the West and is likely to [try to] attack, and we are pretty sure about that. We know some of the precursors from —
Well, they would like to come West, and they would like to come as far West as they can. What we don’t know is…if it’s going to be Mark Hosenball, and he’s coming in on Flight 727 out of Karachi, he’s stopping in Frankfurt, and he’s coming on through with his European Union passport, and he’s coming into New York, and he’s going to do something. I mean, we don’t have that kind of tactical detail.
What we do have, though, is a couple of threads that indicate, you know, some very tactical stuff, and that’s what — you know, that’s what you’re seeing bits and pieces of, and I really can’t go much more into it.
Because we fly coast-to-coast weekly, we see some of the specific things the TSA and DHS authorities are looking for in their current efforts from the differences in screening, surveillance, and procedures that are now in effect at major airports throughout the United States. The increased measures appear to indicate that both airports and aircraft are thought to be among the intended targets, which is precisely what Vice Admiral John Scott Redd indicated above.