streets, buses, trains, and subways are vulnerable.
Other aspects favor an attack: Public transportation
centers offer easy access and escape, if escape is a
planning factor. Contained environments, like a
subway, increase the effects of explosives and the
likelihood of panic and mayhem after an attack.
Transportation systems normally concentrate
people; these concentrations increase the probabili-
ty of mass casualties and effects. The greatest con-
cerns in preventing a catastrophic terrorist incident
are (1) the threat of covert operatives, whether a
sleeper-type cell or a recently recruited operative,
inside the U.S. with an intention to assist or conduct
a terrorist attack; (2) the clear intention of al Qaeda
to obtain and use a WMD against the United States;
and (3) the potential for al Qaeda to leverage other
extremist persons or groups to assist or conduct
attacks on the United States.
U.S. domestic terrorists and other international
terrorist groups pose a threat too. Political and so-
cial agendas include white supremacy, black sepa-
ratism, animal rights, environmental protection, an-
archism, anti-abortion, right-wing Patriot movement
themes, and ethnic Homeland or religious ideology
themes. In a recent instance, the FBI uncovered an
alleged terrorism plot by Americans to target syna-
gogues and military recruiting centers around the
Los Angeles area (see the Case Study—JIS in this
chapter).
The London bombings indicate that a person
can take an extreme concept and recruit targeted
individuals into a small group of committed terror-
ists. He can gather and provide the means for mak-
ing and delivering devastating weapon effects and
attack while attempting to mask mass murder with
a radical ideology and justification.
The danger to the Homeland remains real. The
largest mass transit systems in the United States sup-
port New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston,
and Washington, DC. When Khalid Sheik Muham-
med, a chief subordinate to Osama bin laden, was
captured, he stated during his interrogation that al
Qaeda planned to attack the Washington, DC metro
(subway) system. Risk assessment and management
is a colossal task for any of the transportation sys-
tems. For example, New York City has more than
seven million daily commuters using its network of
buses, trains, and subways. Consider just the tunnel
network of the New York City Metropolitan Trans-
portation Authority. The transportation network in -
cludes 14 tunnels that link four of the city’s five bor-
oughs under three bodies of water—the East River,
the Harlem River, and Newtown Creek (Prieto,
2005). In 1997, law enforcement uncovered and
prevented an Islamic terrorist bomb attack on the
New York City subway system. Another terrorist at-
tempt to bomb the New York City subway system
was prevented in 2004 before the Republican Na-
tional Convention (Hedges, 2006).
