White House Rehearses for a Domestic Attack
February 24th, 2007The same IEDs that the British taught the IRA how to build?
Tell me another one.
Via: MSNBC:
The White House is staging a high-level exercise Saturday to test responses to the prospect of a massive domestic terrorist attack involving IEDs (improvised explosive devices)—the same deadly roadside bombs that have been used by insurgents against the U.S. military in Iraq.
White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend will preside over a group of senior officials—including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Director of National Intelligence John (Mike) McConnell—as they attempt to deal with the latest nightmarish scenario cooked up by government counterterrorism planners.
As part of the exercise, the officials will be handed a thick binder which lays out a scenario involving simultaneous terror attacks by “sleeper cells†of 20 to 25 individuals each dispersed in five cities across the country: New York, Washington, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. The officials will then be tested on how they direct their respective agencies to respond. “We’ve designed this to overtax the system, to push the system beyond the breaking point,†said one senior administration official familiar with planning for the event, who declined to be identified talking about it before it takes place.
While planning for domestic terror attacks is not new, the focus on IEDs in this weekend’s exercise seems at least tacit recognition that the wave of such attacks that have been killing soldiers and civilians in Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan could spread to the United States.
What, no planning for exploding light-brites? ^_^