The Real Threat from ISIL
By Ronald Kessler
The current debate over the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant misses the real threat: a weapons of mass destruction attack that would cause massive casualties.
In interviews for my book "The Secrets of the FBI," Robert S. Mueller III told me when he was FBI director [September 4, 2001 - September 4, 2013] that what keeps him awake at night is the possibility of a terrorist attack using radiological biological, or chemical weapons that would wipe out millions of Americans in cities like New York and Washington.
Given that ISIL has more than $1 billion in cash and additional millions coming in from oil revenue every week, it would be easy for the terrorist group to buy off an expert who could unleash such an attack within the next month or two. Since ISIL members include Americans with U.S. passports, bringing such weapons into this country would be no problem at all.
- "The biggest threat comes from individuals who have had some association with the United States, understand the United States, can move either individually or with others relatively freely into the United States and within the United States," Mueller has told me.
Thus, those who say ISIL poses no immediate threat to the homeland because no credible plot has yet been detected or would only shoot up some people in a shopping mall or knock down a building are as wrong as those who thought before 9/11 that al Qaeda consisted of a bunch of cavemen who could never launch a major attack on the U.S.
- Moreover, because of laxness and corner cutting by Secret Service management exposed in my book The First Family Detail, the agency has not kept up to date with the latest technology for detecting WMD or preventing an attack on the White House. Having ignored the ISIL threat for nearly a year as it obviously gained momentum, President Obama could tragically wind up being its victims.
Even a WMD attack that does not kill a great number of people would have a crushing psychological impact.
"A singular lone wolf individual can do things in the dark of the night with access to a laboratory with low quantities of material and could hurt a few people but create a devastating effect on the American psyche," according to Dr. Vahid Majidi, who was the FBI’s assistant director in charge of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
- Another "huge" potential threat, says Arthur M. "Art" Cummings II, who headed FBI counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations, is the explosion by terrorists of a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere to unleash an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The electromagnetic pulse generated by the blast would fry all electronics in North America. Because almost everything we need to survive relies on microchips—computers, financial records, furnaces, refrigerators, police dispatchers, hospitals, telephones, cars, trains, trucks, and planes—such a blast would send America back to the 1300s.
In the event of an EMP attack, the electrical power grid would be destroyed because its computers would be inoperative. Transformers critical to it would take years to replace. The vast majority of Americans would die from starvation or disease or would freeze to death, according to Dr. William Graham, who was chairman of the bipartisan congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack. And those exposed to biological, radiological, or chemical weapons would die horrible deaths.
- The Obama administration has said it will take three years to wipe out ISIL In the meantime, we could all become its victims. As long as ISIL exists, the question is not whether but when cataclysmic attacks by the barbaric group on the U.S. homeland will occur.
BIO: Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, is the author of "The Secrets of the FBI" and "The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents".
http://www.mainjustice.com//2014/09/18/the-real-threat-from-isil/
