Smaller Scale Terrorist Attacks Cannot Happen in the United States?

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has an excellent follow-up article about a propane explosion in Falk, WI in December of last year. The article is based on extensive interviews with employees and investigators. It provides a lot of detail that was not available during the initial news reporting. The blast killed 3 and injured 45 people.

While I do not remember this story from December, it was certainly a major event for personnel working at that plant, and of course the surrounding community. If this had not been a 'routine' industrial accident, but rather a terrorist attack I'm sure that the whole country would have been aware of this incident.

The new federal regulations for protecting chemical facilities do not adequately address this type of situation. This facility would appear to be covered by the Top Screen requirement due to the amount of Propane on site (612,000 pounds). That means that the facility would have to enter data into the Top Screen Module of the Chemical Security Assessment Tool (CSAT), a web based tool that DHS has created to collect data on facilities that might end up being designated a High Risk Chemical Facility. But, unless there are a large number of people living nearby or there are some nasty toxic chemicals on site, it is doubtful that this manufacturing facility would make the list of High Risk facilities. The remainder of the requirements on these security rules would not apply if DHS does not designate this facility as a High Risk Facility. The narrow scope of this regulation is not the fault of DHS, it was mandated by Congress in the legislation authorizing DHS to prepare these rules.

So, could this plant be a terrorist target or not? Well, if you look at the history of terrorist attacks in the United States, probably not. Our history of terrorist attacks would suggest that terrorists only attack large, high-profile, high-casualty targets, like the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City or the Twin Towers in New York City. Of course if you were to look at attacks in most of the rest of the world, it becomes less certain that this would not be a target.

This is one of the interesting things about the terror threat in the United States. To date it seems that terrorists believe that only large attacks will have any effect. I don't understand why this would be the case, but that is the appearance. The major thing that is wrong with that is that people in the United States have a relatively short attention span and the long time between attacks lets people get complacent. If terrorists were to make a larger number of smaller, well publicized attacks, they might have more of an effect on the public perception.

Part of the problem may be the cost of setting up a terror network in this country. A terror network attacking Israel from the West Bank or Gaza is fairly cheap to maintain. Training people in the Middle East/Southwest Asia, moving them to the United States, setting up safe houses, moving weapons and equipment into place, scoping out the targets, conducting practice attacks, and of course feeding and housing the team, all would seem to bring up the cost of an attack. So may be the big attacks are what we should be most worried about. After all, only large attacks justify the risk and cost to the terrorist organization.

Of course, as news coming out of New York City this weekend shows, more and more of the terrorist attacks will be coming from home grown terrorists. As the FBI takes down more of these groups trying to conduct big attacks against New York airports or New Jersey Army Bases, someone is going to get the idea that smaller attacks might have a better chance of being accomplished by these home grown groups. After all, it is during the extensive prep work, particularly in getting someone to provide weapons and equipment that the FBI and other anti-terrorist investigators find these people. If the attacks were less ambitious, requiring less support, it would be harder for these groups to rise to the level where they can be noticed by the FBI.

We do have groups within the United States that have been successfully completing series of low-cost, low-risk attacks. These are our home-grown ecoterrorist and animal-rights terrorist organizations. They have not made the news beyond the local scene because they have been fairly careful not to kill people in their attacks. If these groups, or their splinter groups, were to decide to step up the ante to get the national attention that their causes would need to succeed, they would probably go for attacks of this size. There they would choose their targets for visibility and connection with things that they hate.

If this had been a terrorist attack, and the group immediately claimed responsibility, like is normally the case in the rest of the world, we would all have noticed the attack. The various purveyors of the 24-hour news cycle would have had teams on site with round the clock pictures of the burning wreckage and interviews with the survivors and the families of the dead and wounded. The pundits would be on screen pointing out how many people are vulnerable to the same type of attack. Three dead and 45 wounded would get nearly the same play as the 3,000+ dead from 9-11, at least in the short run.

If there were a number of this size of attacks against various venues across the country, there would certainly be panic. The American public would demand blood. Any country in the world that looked like it might support that kind of attack (Iran, Syria, etc) or group that might support that kind of attack (Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, etc) will be the targets of the wrath of the public. The fact that retaliatory attacks would incite more radicalization of Muslim countries and more copy cats from within this country would make no difference to the American public. The public would demand the fundamentalist eye-for-an-eye response.

While the Department of Homeland Security continues with their ambitious schedule of improving the security of High Risk Chemical Facilities, someone needs to start looking at what will be necessary to make attacks against lower value targets more difficult. Easy attacks are, in the long run, more likely to succeed, if for no other reason than the FBI and intelligence agencies are looking for the players going after the big targets. Sooner or later, the terrorists are going to start realizing this.