Passaic County Herald News
For three days this week, beat cops, bomb squad technicians and even security officials from the National Football League and Atlantic City casinos gathered at the Ocean County Police Academy to hear FBI experts describe a new challenge in America’s war on terror.
How can they detect a homemade bomb?
The FBI insists the seminar was planned long before the botched attempt to set off a homemade bomb in Times Square almost two weeks ago. But the bureau acknowledges that its “improvised explosive familiarization initiative” could not be timelier.
The FBI, which ended the seminar Thursday by detonating an array of homemade bombs to demonstrate their explosive power, ran out of classroom space and had to turn away some would-be participants.
“We were getting an overwhelming response,” said Newark FBI spokesman Bryan Travers.
Since the Times Square incident on May 1 and the arrest days later of a Pakistani-born American citizen who reportedly tried to set off a brew of fertilizer, firecrackers and gasoline, law enforcement officials say they have stepped up efforts to spot homemade bombs and homegrown terrorists. As part of an expanding investigation of the Times Square plot, federal agents staged raids on Thursday in South Jersey, Massachusetts and Long Island, reportedly targeting the web of cash-for-terror couriers.
But terrorism experts say Times Square was not the first local target of a homemade bomb. In February, Najibullah Zazi, a Denver airport shuttle bus driver who emigrated from Afghanistan, pleaded guilty to federal charges that he conspired to set off bombs made from beauty supply chemicals in the New York City subways.
Federal officials say Zazi lived for several years in the United States but developed terrorist sympathies after visiting the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and meeting members of the Taliban.
A similar path to radicalization was reportedly followed by Faisal Shahzad, the suspect at the center of the Times Square plot.
Shahzad lived comfortably in Connecticut for a decade. He went to college, got married, became a father, bought a house and landed a job at a financial marketing services firm. But last year, he suddenly returned to Pakistan, where federal investigators say he was trained in bomb-making by the Taliban.
The recruiting of American residents to become terrorists marks a significant shift.
“It’s a new danger and a new strategy by terrorists,” said former New Jersey governor and 9/11 commission chairman Tom Kean.
But is America ready?
Not yet, says Kean.
In the years immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Kean said, security experts understandably focused efforts on stopping foreign terrorists from sneaking across our borders to carry out a massive attack. Now, he said, federal and state officials have concluded that they need to pay more attention to terrorists who perhaps had lived quietly for years but suddenly became radicalized.
“We’ve been predicting this,” said former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who now runs a security consulting firm. “It’s not really that new. It just seems to have intensified lately.”
Chertoff, who grew up in Elizabeth and served as the U.S. attorney in Newark during the early 1990s, points to other attempted attacks, such as the Fort Dix murder plot involving six Muslim men from South Jersey, as examples of homegrown terrorism. In the Fort Dix case, the FBI arrested the six suspects just before they planned to attack Fort Dix and “kill as many soldiers as possible.” Four were sentenced to life in prison, one received a 33-year sentence and one a five-year prison term.
The Fort Dix plot unraveled when a clerk in a Circuit City store called police after being asked to make DVD copies of a video of the conspirators firing guns and shouting jihadist slogans associated with terrorism.
In Times Square this month, a sidewalk vendor noticed smoke coming from what turned out to be an explosives-packed SUV. He tipped off police, who then cleared away bystanders so a bomb squad could defuse what turned out to be a malfunctioning bomb.
Counterterror experts point to the involvement of such ordinary people as a key to stopping future attacks.
“We’re looking to establish certain tripwires that make the hair on the back of people’s necks go up,” said the FBI’s Michael Ward, who recently left a top post in the bureau’s counterterror division in Washington to take over the FBI’s Newark office.
Ward said possible tripwires could be as basic as a customer previously unknown to a farm products store buying a large quantity of explosives-grade fertilizer. Or, said Ward, it could be the owner of a beauty supply store feeling uneasy about a customer suddenly buying an abundance of highly explosive hydrogen peroxide.
“If there is something that doesn’t seem right,” Ward said, “give us a call.”
That kind of strategy ? asking the general public to be alert ? is also being promoted by the superintendant of the New Jersey State Police, Col. Joseph Fuentes.
Fuentes pointed to a computerized information center in Ewing, nicknamed “The Rock,” that allows the state police to collect tips from police all over New Jersey, then analyze them.
“It’s a renaissance in information sharing,” he said. “The ability to connect the dots to those routine police events is the greatest insurance policy we have in preventing a terrorist attack, whether they are from here or from overseas.”
From the FBI and Homeland Security to the state police “Rock,” many experts agree that the best line of defense against homegrown terrorism ? and homemade bombs ? is local beat cops.
From his office at the New Milford police station, Chief Frank Papapietro is the first to agree.
Besides his own department, Papapietro runs the Bergen County Rapid Deployment Force, which includes officers from many towns who can be called for emergencies. Before Sept. 11, 2001, those emergencies were often major fires or plane crashes. Now terrorism is also a priority, Papapietro said.
Local police have monitored fertilizer purchases and even inspected self-storage facilities with radiation detection devices, he said.
“We always believed that our next headache would be the radicalization of terrorists who already live here,” Papapietro said. “Now that possibility is real.”
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