Years Later 10 World Confronts U.S. Sept. 11, 2006:
A tribute, in sand, to the World Trade Center on a beach in Puri, India.
belly, or rectum of an airline passen- ger and detonated at will, triggered a Transportation Security Admin- istration warning this summer. Asiri is said not only to have sent
BURNING HATRED After bin Laden’s death in Multan, Pakistan.
da and like-minded militant Islamist groups still threaten Americans, and it stresses that such groups are con- stantly innovating and evolving. Rand Beers, the DHS undersecre- tary for national protection, defends his agency against its many critics. While still a work in progress, “we’ve gone from zero to layered, far more robust systems of defense,” he says. In a July interview at DHS head- quarters in Washington, Beers asserted that the creation of 72 state and urban “fusion centers,” which gather, receive, analyze, and share threat information, had dramatically enhanced homeland security. “Prior to 9/11, there was no home for sys-
tematically reaching out to the pri- vate sector to act together to defend critical infrastructure and institu- tions,” he said.
Beers, a former Marine who has
served on the National Security Council staff of four presidents, sees danger as militant groups become more sophisticated. The jihadis’ per- sistent efforts to stage another assault against Americans using ever-more creative techniques includes efforts by
Ibrahim Asiri, an innovative
young Saudi bomb-maker from al- Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemeni-based AQAP.
Asiri’s efforts to perfect a “body bomb,” implanted in
the breast,
his own brother off with a bomb implanted in his rectum, but to have designed the “cargo bombs” that nearly brought down two planes last December. He evaded cargo scan- ners and detectors by implanting a powerful explosive, PETN, in an ink cartridge, as ink and PETN emit similar chemical signatures. Asiri is thought to be working with surgeons and doctors on surmount- ing the challenge of detonating a body bomb more easily and reliably and preventing the suicide bomber’s body from muffl ing the power of the bomb. This is no longer the stuff of science fi ction, says Beers.
Cyberwar Topping the list of current threats that are likely to be even more dev- astating in the future are cyberat- tacks. William Schneider, a former undersecretary of state and senior fellow on the Defense Science Board, is alarmed by the prospect of sophis- ticated strikes that go far beyond “denial of service” attacks, but which disrupt or destroy the infrastructure which underlies modern societies — electrical grids and dams, transporta- tion and communications systems, and the U.S.’ fi nancial service sector. A prime example of what can already be done, he says, is the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear program, which damaged the centrifuge cascade of the Islamic Republic’s main uranium enrich-
SEPTEMBER 2011 / NEWSMAX / 9|11: A DECADE LATER 81
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