The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Finding a needle in a haystack is child’s play compared with the difficulty of protecting the public from explosives that could be placed in any of the millions of cars and trucks on the roads in and around New York and Washington.
Those areas are under heightened alert after federal officials disclosed al Qaeda terrorists were interested in using vehicle bombs to attack financial institutions in Newark, New Jersey, Manhattan and the nation’s capital.
A car or truck bombing is much easier to pull off than the spectacular suicide airplane hijackings of September 11, 2001. Vehicles are easy to get, easy to drive and easy to hide, and any number of explosives can be hidden in them. Detonating a vehicle can be done by remote control or with a suicide terrorist.
For years, the truck bomb has been a weapon of choice for terrorists. More than 200 people were killed in 1998 when al Qaeda terrorists drove bomb-laden trucks into the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The 1995 Oklahoma City attack was carried out by homegrown terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols using a rented truck filled with a homemade fertilizer bomb.
A terrorist driving a truck can blend in with the thousands of plumbers, electricians, caterers, contractors, movers, utility workers, grocery deliverers that ply the streets every day.
Terrorism experts say preventing an attack like the one described during the weekend by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is extremely difficult without strangling commerce and inconveniencing large numbers of people. About 23 million people live in the New York-Northern New Jersey and Washington areas.
“Public places are public places,” said Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., an independent think tank. “The lifelines to these tall buildings are trucks. They come with food; they come with supplies. Trucks are a part of our society.”
Barriers have been set up around the buildings targeted: the World Bank headquarters and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, the Citigroup Center building and the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, and Prudential Financial Inc.'s headquarters in northern New Jersey.
Trucks are inspected before they are allowed to approach the buildings. Traffic has been rerouted. Main arteries into New York, the Holland Tunnel, the Williamsburg Bridge and the northbound Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, are closed to trucks.
All that effort may simply shift an explosion to someplace more convenient for the bomber, Jenkins said.
“If you’re moving the bomb down the block, that is not an achievement,” he said.
Truckers are being asked to report anything unusual or suspicious to the American Trucking Associations’ Information Sharing Analysis Center, or ISAC, located at a command center in Herndon, Virginia. Their tips are forwarded to law enforcement officials for analysis and follow-up.
ISAC, for example, sent a blast fax to drivers notifying them of traffic restrictions and reminding them that all commercial drivers are required to have all their travel papers ready to present to law enforcement officers.
Gail Toth, executive director of the New Jersey Motor Truck Association, said trucks, especially tankers, are being stopped and inspected more often than usual.
Since September 11, Toth’s members -- major truck fleets -- have been rerouting trips around New York City and keeping an eye out for unusual occurrences.
“They know the drill,” Toth said, adding that the specific nature of the current orange alert makes it “a little more unnerving.”
“It’s going to delay people, and there are going to be costs involved, but that’s the world we live in today,” she said.
Jerome Hauer, a George Washington University professor and former director of New York City’s emergency services, said it isn’t possible to eliminate the threat of a truck bomb.
“You can’t,” he said. “You institute much more stringent checks of trucks going into the city, but that doesn’t take into account what’s already in warehouses in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island.”
The only way to find such bombs, he said, is a random check; in that case, a terrorist is likely to detonate the bomb during the check.