Tuesday, November 09, 2004

The next terror attack?

Michelle Malkin provides two chilling reports that remind us that the war on terror didn't end just because the American appeasers lost one election.

1) A crop duster was stolen in Mexico last week. Malkin provides links to other stories that reveal the link between terrorist activity in general and crop dusters.


2) Even worse, there are reports of more than 100 large propane cylinders stolen in Colorado since July. Each of these cylinders, if detonated, has the capacity to bring down a building.

Niether Homeland Security nor law enforcement authorities appear to be following up on these reports.

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mid-day update

These stories remind me of the need for vigilance as the war continues. Peggy Noonan provided detailed advice three years ago on how ordinary Americans can prevent and/or deal with future attacks.

An earlier column of Noonan's reveals that the above items may not be happening in a vacuum. The enemy is patient. Plans for terror made today might bear poisonous fruit years down the road.

Among the obversations that Noonan catalogued:

Now jump to this past week [October 2001]. Two things happen. My son is surfing Internet chat rooms last Sunday and goes to a conservative site, where he sees an interesting thing. A man or woman has written in to say--again I paraphrase--"The oddest thing happened at work the other day. I work at a petrochemical company, and these two Mideastern looking guys come in and say they want to videotape the inside of the plant for a college course they're taking. They were approached and asked for identification by the manager. They became surly, angry, and left. Later the manager phoned the school they claimed to be students at--and they weren't even registered!"

My son calls to me, we read it and look at each other. I decided to call the FBI again.

But the next morning my phone rings and it is the FBI, and it seems to be a real agent, not a telephone answerer. My initial tip line report has, apparently, trickled up into the "check it out" category. Or maybe they've gotten enough reports like mine that a discernable pattern has emerged. At any rate, the agent asked me to go through my story and the driver's story, and then I threw in the report on the Internet, and he gave me his name and number and asked me to call if I saw anything else.

After discussing the concept of sleeper cells - a new concept for post 9/11 America at that time, she places those and other incidents in context:
I think some cell members may not be sure what their next move is. They're not sure of their next assignment. They haven't been told, or they haven't, perhaps, chosen. I think cell members have been going around taking home movies of potential targets. I suspect they've been downloading them into computers and shooting them off to Osama and his lieutenants in the caves. I suspect they've been building a video library of places they might hit over the next few months and years and decade. And I think once they take one of the targets down they'll happily return to the scene of the crime, take a nice tourist-type videotape of the crater they made--they'll tell the cops they want to record the brave rescue workers--and send it triumphantly home.

As if to rub salt in the wounds, John Kerry and the Dems will then immediately step forward to say "I told you so."
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Monday afternoon update (11/14/04)

Click here to see the MSM's position on the next terror attack.

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