Fears reach U.S. - terror in a trunk

Source: bendbulletin
May 03. 2010 4:00AM PST For years it has been a weapon of choice in hot spots across the globe, from Iraq to Sri Lanka to Colombia: cars or trucks loaded with explosives, detonated in busy markets, public squares and government buildings.




Since 9/11, both law enforcement officials and average New Yorkers have worried and wondered — why not here? They were simpler propositions than hijacked planes, and they could, as a result, have an even more destabilizing effect on the city and its residents.



Saturday night, however crudely imagined and ultimately botched, the threat of a car bomb hit New York.



It was brought home on a busy street off Times Square in the form of a smoking Nissan Pathfinder loaded with propane, gasoline, fireworks and bags of what the authorities described as nonexplosive fertilizer.



‘You know it’s coming’





The roughly fashioned device — wired with clocks and designed to, in the words of the police, “cause mayhem” — was dismantled before it could do harm. But for New Yorkers, it was an unsubtle and unsettling reminder that threats could be lurking in the trunks or back seats of any of the thousands of vehicles that push their way into the city every day.



“You know it’s coming,” said Konstantine Pinteris, 42, a Greenwich Village psychotherapist who lives on the Lower East Side. “It’s in the back of your mind. All the time.”



Counterterrorism officials are ever wary of vehicular threats, as evidenced by the sidewalk barriers blocking access to sensitive buildings across the city, and by the Police Department’s determination to place hundreds of surveillance cameras in the city’s financial district.



And of course, the country is no stranger to huge vehicle bombs. The 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people. The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 killed six. In both, hundreds were injured.



But since 9/11, as car bombs have wreaked varying degrees of havoc in Baghdad and Kabul, Peshawar, Pakistan, and Glasgow, Scotland, New York has been free of that particular menace. Eerily so, for many.



“One of the things that’s striking is they’re incredibly effective,” said Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. “They’re very lethal. So why not in the U.S.? That’s a great question.”



Lethal yes, in part because of their everyday quality and their mobility, said Jim Cavanaugh, a bomb expert who retired last month as head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Nashville field division.



“We call them vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices,” he said. “That’s sort of the inside baseball vernacular, but basically it’s a car bomb, and of course the reason the car is used is the delivery. It can carry the weight.”



From 1970 through 2007, terrorists used car bombs at least 1,495 times, according to research by the terrorism response center in Maryland. The center tracked 876 in the Middle East and North Africa, 212 in Western Europe and 163 in South Asia.



Among the biggest culprits were the Irish Republican Army, the Basque Fatherland and Freedom in Spain, the Taliban and al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, the center found.



A mix of reactions





New Yorkers on Sunday had contradictory reactions to the failed bomb attack. Many said they had grown accustomed to the fear of terrorist attacks, and they could not say they were truly surprised. Others, who said they had gotten used to the fact that no terrorist strike had succeeded in the city since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were now suddenly faced with a reminder of how suddenly and randomly it could happen.



Roy Otwell, 53, who sells contemporary furniture accessories and lives several blocks from Times Square, said he always felt currents of apprehension whenever he crossed a bridge or drove through tunnels into Manhattan. The fear gripped him too when he walked through Times Square.



“I always thought that it would be a logical place,” said Otwell, who has lived in New York for five years. “That it would represent the center of the world to the rest of the world, even though for locals, it’s not that at all.”



Peter Nash, 65, a neuroscientist who lives on the Upper West Side, said he had been expecting another terror attack in New York since 9/11. He said he had taken precautions like renting a safe deposit box outside the city for important personal and business papers, keeping an emergency pack (flashlight, duct tape, plastic bags, canned foods) in his apartment and arranging rendezvous points with friends.



“It’s just a matter of time,” he said. “It’s the nature of terrorist organizations that they don’t do creative things and worthwhile things; they destroy. The only thing that surprises me is they haven’t been more successful.”



Whoever left the bomb in Times Square picked a spot that is already assumed to be a target and where it was likely someone would spot it, Gottlieb said.



He said the driver of the Nissan simply could have parked it at a meter on Madison Avenue “and I don’t know who would be left.”



But Michael Sheehan, the New York City Police Department’s top counterterrorism official from 2003 to 2006, said one reason car bombs have been rare in the United States is that they are harder to make and set off than people might think.



“They haven’t been able to do anything, and the reason is quite simply, in the U.S., they have not had the access to the training to put together a sophisticated bomb,” Sheehan said.

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