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We are not done yet.
--Ramsey Yousef, when told by an FBI agent that the World Trade Center, which Yousef had bombed Feb. 26, 1993, was still standing (quoted in the book "Our Own Worst Enemy," by USAF Col. (Ret.) Randall Larsen).
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.
--Non-metropolitan America, including Fredericksburg, was frightened and sad when the attacks of 9/11 brought horrific death and destruction to New York City and the Pentagon, inside the Washington Beltway. Yet Americans who lived far from big cities could comfort themselves with a soft and fuzzy blanket of an idea.The idea was that mass-murdering terrorists probably thought their communities simply too small to molest. Al-Qaida, whose basic war-fighting doctrine is macabrely captured by the title of an Edgar Rice Burroughs story--"More Fun! More People Killed!"--and its knockoffs later certified their fondness for big-city, high-profile targets by bombing Madrid and London.
Smallville. Grover's Corner. Podunk. The real-world counterparts of such American places--you live in one--seem relatively safe from the globe's masters of evil. Stay away from the big cities--how many of us thought and advised this just after 9/11?--and you should be OK.
But Paul Bremer, the former U.S. administrator to Iraq and one of the presenters at a national-security conference here earlier this month, thinks that almost no American is beyond danger. Starting in the late 1980s, Mr. Bremer served in several elite anti-terrorist posts, including federal coordinator for counterterrorism. A report he helped write before Sept. 11, 2001, outlined one plausible scenario of a terrorist attack: in 10 or 12 widely separated suburban malls, with conventional explosives, simultaneously, on Black Friday--the bustling shopping day in which many of us took part two days ago.
Although the casualties of such an attack might fall below the 9/11 mark, its economic impact, said Ambassador Bremer, could surpass that awful day, as a whole nation shied indefinitely from normal commercial activity.
Moreover, the attacks, if conducted by a highly trained network of operatives, would be almost undetectable until too late. Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons--the classic WMD--are complicated to make and move internationally. Not so, conventional bombs, which al-Qaida's manuals instruct its killers to assemble inside targeted countries. Yousef nearly took down at least one of the Twin Towers with a homemade bomb, whose ingredients cost under $400.
One of those ingredients was sodium cyanide, which Yousef hoped would circulate in the tower's vent shafts. "Fortunately," writes Mr. Larsen--another speaker at The Heritage Foundation- and El Pomar Foundation-sponsored seminar "The WMD Threat and America's Communities"--"the explosion neutralized the cyanide." But what might be an al-Qaida motto, "Better Dying Through Chemistry," could yield more lethal results in, say, concurrent shopping-center detonations.
(An "enhanced conventional explosive," viz. jet fuel, on Sept. 11, 2001, finished the work Yousef had begun. On 9/11, Mr. Bremer, the anti-terrorism veteran, was the CEO of a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., which had offices in both towers. Mr. Bremer, who worked in the South Tower, lost 295 colleagues in the attacks. Sometimes policy gets personal.)
In Israel, 90 percent of bombers are thwarted "to the left of the boom" (before an attack occurs) because every Israeli, for obvious reasons, has learned to be part-bloodhound, part-psychic. Eight years after 9/11, every American has learned, one fears, to be complacent. To close his book, Mr. Larsen quotes Marshall McLuhan: "There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew." That is a philosophy well worth American adoption because there will be more Black Fridays, more Presidents Day sales, more door-buster deals, more jam-packed bowl-game stadiums.
And our would-be murderers are not done yet.
