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U.S. Terrorism Threat Level Could Soon Drop
The U.S. Homeland Security Department could drop the mass transit terrorism alert level from high risk to elevated this week, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, July 8). U.S. authorities remain concerned about copycat attacks following the London subway and bus bombings. Such incidents tend to occur within two weeks of the first attack, counterterrorism officials said Friday (Associated Press/USA Today, July 11). Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that his agency was examining additional ways to protect mass transit, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “We want to do it in a disciplined way, we want to do it in a risk-focused way, and we want to be driven not just by last week’s events but by all kinds of threats — because, you know, we still worry about aviation, we worry about bioweapons,” Chertoff told ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” While the proposed fiscal 2006 White House budget for the Transportation Safety Administration contains $4.7 billion for aviation security, it designates $32 million for all forms of surface transportation combined, according to the Chronicle. “There’s an imbalance here,” Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) told “Fox News Sunday.” However, some of the $8 billion in unspecified Homeland Security grants issued last year could be applied to mass transit security, should local authorities wish to do so, said Chertoff (Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle, July 11). Senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, said he remained most concerned about terrorists potentially smuggling weapons of mass destruction into the country and that protecting mass transit requires better intelligence rather than infrastructure improvement, AP reported yesterday. “It’s hard to protect mass transit, other than by increasing the visibility of police officers and having more bomb-sniffing dogs. A well-organized terrorist group is going to find some place in the transit system that they are going to be able to attack if that is their desire,” he said. “The real protection here comes from having better intelligence and from a stronger commitment to gathering intelligence so that we can stop people before they strike.” Gregg’s committee last month voted to reduce rail and transit security grants to state and local governments from $150 million to $100 million. The Senate is expected to restore that money, said a budget aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). The planned Homeland Security Department budget includes $1.4 billion for research on countering weapons of mass destruction (Associated Press/Portsmouth Herald, July 10). Some analysts remain concerned that terrorists could soon acquire chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, the Toronto Star reported Saturday. “We absolutely know from their correspondence that weapons of mass destruction are what they want to do,” said Matthew Devost, president of the Terrorism Research Center. “They’ve said that if they can acquire them, it’s their ‘moral obligation’ to use them.” If that happens, “it rocks the foundation of a nation. A country can recover from a small number of people being killed in a terrorist attack, but it would be much harder when the numbers are in the many thousands” (Lynda Hurst, Toronto Star, July 9).
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