Final Review: Ground-Level View of Obvious Vulnerabilities and a General Failure to Protect
February 10, 2010 [final review 21 February]
Sam Faddis
My own new book is finally at the printer, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty and I am really enjoying getting back into serial reading. I totally respected and agreed with this author's first book, Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and I find this ground-level view “from our enemies' eyes” to be quite helpful, accurate, and alarming.
This is not a book the Administration (regardless of which party happens to be in control on any given day) because the Administration is totally out of touch with reality, totally partisan, and largely not interested in the welfare of average Americans because Wall Street money is personal, our tax payments are not–they go to the highest bidder.
Indeed, the decisions that the Administration makes every day not only make our citizens less safe, they cost our earnest honest businesses billions of dollars as imposed costs from government errors of understanding and policy and regulation. See my article in Homeland Security Today on “America's Cyber-Scam,” and separately, my update on the massive looting of Haiti that is about to take place as American contractors rush to swindle everyone, joining the Red Cross in the 50% overhead scam–only in the case of US contractors paying Haitians a dollar a day, it will be more like 80% scam.
What the author has done that no one else has done to date, is actually “walk” the ground across America looking for obvious vulnerabilities that terrorists armed with silencers and willing to die could exploit.
Each chapter covers a different vulnerability, and the value of this book is easily seen in the fact that this is almost “real-time” intelligence on specific vulnerabilities, the author has been “up close and personal” with each one, and the bottom line is clear: The US Government and state and local government have no idea how to protect America internally, we are living on grace, not preparedness (just as CIA offices under official cover overseas are not really operating under cover, just tacit immunity from local liaison which has them all pegged).
Chapter one takes down two military facilities.
Chapter two takes out an Amtrack express train and then a NYC subway under prime real estate.
Chapter three covers schools and I particularly endorse the author's urging that people be trained to fight back. I teach “rush and crush.” The students who died at Virginia Polytechnic stood around like sheep–had they all rushed the gunwan, throwing things at him the minute the gun was visible, I am absolutely certain no more than two students would have died and with luck none, emergency medicine today is good.
Chapter four bring Bhopal home to the USA, and here I have to insert a strong recommendation for Charles Perrow's new book, The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters. Our irresposible government and irresponsible industry are our own worst enemey, not Al Qaeda or disgruntled patriots that hate what the government has done in running down America.
Chapter five is the US Coast Guard's worst nightmare, a liquid natural gas tanker such as the Coast Guard has recently approved for entry deep into Boston (and originating in Yemen, no less–the mind boggles).
Chapter six takes out a dam that floods an entire valley (you can also take out the Hoover power generation capability with a couple of well-placed snatchel charges).
Chapter seven not only explores the implications of smallpox and other reemerging infectious diseases (see on this Andrew Price-Smith's The Health of Nations: Infectious Disease, Environmental Change, and Their Effects on National Security and Development but what happens when terrorists blow past the bored hired guards at Fort Detrick and penetrate for the purpose of releasing the bio labs where we are very unwisely playing with massive death every day–stuff that should be done on a remote island, if at all.
REPEATEDLY what this book does is demonstrate that military and commercial hazardous activities and materials are so deeply embedded into our civilian population that it will be a simple matter, in the near future, for muotiple dedicated teams to give America multiple sucking chest wounds from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Chicago to Boston.
Chapter eight takes down and then explodes a nuclear plant here in the USA–some might recall that the 9-11 plot supported by the Pakistani intelligence service was finally disclosed to the USA when the terrorists suggested putting one of the hijacked aircraft into a nuclear plant on the East Coast. That scared them enough to tell Dick Cheney, and he took it from there, scheduling a counter-terrorism exercise and giving Larry Silverstein and Rudy Guliani carte blanche for controlled demolitions (including WTC 7 not hit at all).
The author, who has a son fighting in Afghanistan for the US Marine Corps, ends with some specific recommendations that I whole-heartedly agree with:
01 Start taking the threat seriously
02 Stop using homeland security as an excuse to dispense port and engage in corporate welfare
03 Recognize that paperwork and bureaucracy are not what stop bad people from doing bad things
04 Start thinking like the people who are trying to kill us and design our defenses to respond to the threat
05 Stop wasting time
I am reminded of how hard England, an island, had to work to find and control Nazi spies in World War II. The USA is wide open, and as the “Underpants Bomber” demonstrated recently, foolish bureaucrats are all to eager to accept an Israeli false flag obmber (intended to get US to carpet bomb Yemen) and to over-ride a State Department move to cancel his visa so they could “follow him” in the USA. It never occurred to these people he might be intending to blow the plane up before it landed, and we still have not seen the guy taking videos from the front, something the Israelis like to do (remember the camara crew they sent into the US weeks before 9-11 to set up a film shoot of the entire “project”).
See also:
The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation
America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism
While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today
While America Sleeps: How Islam, Immigration and Indoctrination Are Destroying America From Within
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
