WASHINGTON - Al-Qaida's most recent edition of Inspire magazine urges
sympathizers to take advantage of opportunities to attack Americans in
the U.S. homeland, using whatever means necessary.
Small airplanes may be among their most sought-after weapons.
U.S. intelligence officials have publicly stated al-Qaida no longer has
the capability or the operational cover to dispatch 19 people to hijack
jumbo passenger jets as they did during the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. But
smaller airplanes are within their reach.
Just days before the 10th anniversary of the attacks last year, the
Department of Homeland Security and the FBI warned in an unclassified
bulletin: "Al-Qaida-inspired violent extremists will likely try to
identify and exploit vulnerabilities and gaps in general aviation
security, which may make attacks using small aircraft appear more
achievable."
"General aviation is still the Achilles heel [of U.S. aviation] when you
look at this sector [of transportation]," says Fred Burton, vice
president of intelligence at Stratfor Global Intelligence.
"To be blunt, you don't have the degree of scrutiny on the domestic
private air flights that you would have with an inbound foreign flag
carrier with our no-fly list and so forth."
The wide open, hard-to-police spaces of the 1,969-mile U.S.-Mexico border are a major concern.
"Even with the most sophisticated ISR surveillance-type of equipment, if
somebody is determined to fly under the radar, both literally and
figuratively, they probably can," says Jay F. Joseph, a retired Marine
colonel and aviator.
Joseph's concerns mirror those laid out in a portion of the FBI/DHS bulletin, which read:
Lone offenders without ties to violent extremist organizations and members of terrorist groups such as al-Qaida, with general aviation training and knowledge, pose a potential threat to the Homeland because their plans to misuse or steal small aircraft would be difficult to monitor and predict.
"You could pop up from a rural ranch property or from the west into the
air channels and drive a plane into downtown Houston in some kind of
chemical or oil target," Burton says.
That possibility is particularly challenging, considering the
established link between powerful drug cartels located in Mexico and
terror organizations.
Mike Braun, former Drug Enforcement Administration chief of operations,
told WTOP in 2008 and reiterated to Congress last October that "the
nexus between drugs and terrorism is growing at a rate far faster than
most policy makers in Washington, D.C. choose to admit, and far fewer
will even talk about."
He and other intelligence and security experts have long-warned U.S.
officials about the confluence between them and the resources at their
disposal, including large airplanes.
"The cartels have great resources in terms of both personnel and
aircraft to breach the security of the southern border," Joseph says.
"And for whatever reason, if the activities, whether they be illegal or
illicit, and if somebody wants to penetrate that border, they certainly
can and it is virtually at will."
The DHS/FBI bulletin also warns:
Al-Qaida and its affiliates have maintained an interest in obtaining aviation training, particularly on small aircraft, and in recruiting Western individuals for training in Europe or the United States.
The bulletin laid out three events involving small planes since 2002,
including in April 2009 when a "Turkish-born Canadian stole a Cessna 172
aircraft from a flight school in Thunder Bay, Canada and flew hundreds
of miles across the United States on an apparent joyride before landing
on a dirt road in Missouri."
Authorities in Texas point to a 2010 crash in Austin where a disgruntled
software engineer crashed his plane into the IRS building, killing
himself and igniting a massive fireball in the building. Several people
were hospitalized in the attack.
Recognizing that loopholes in general aviation exist, Burton says "short
of adjusting our intelligence collection capabilities to monitor those
kinds of flights, there's very little that you're going to be able to do
to prevent that [attacks like the IRS crash]."
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