The 9/11 anniversary attack threat we’ve heard about recently in the news was just opened up a bit by The Daily—News Corp’s iPad-only daily newspaper—who have obtained a joint FBI/Homeland Security bulletin on the attack threat and posted it online.
Highlights:
- The potential terrorist threat may be walking around as “operatives carrying around US documentation.”
- There’s concern that an attack centered around symbolic dates such as the tenth anniversary of September 11th—which they’ve been interested in since February 2010—is also now especially motivated by “the May 2011 death of Usama Bin Ladin (UBL)” as “a way to avenge UBL’s death and reassert al-Qa’ida’s relevance.“
- This specific threat shows interest in utilizing a “vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs),” better known as a car bomb. They cite the May 2010 attempt to car bomb Times Square as precedent.
- Other than Washington DC and New York City, there’s no information about where an attack would be carried out, though they’re particularly concerned about “aviation, mass transit systems, US Government and Military Sites.”
- Also: “The attacks would be intended to cause panic within the public and disarray among first responders.”
The first page of the memo, via The Daily:
It’s worth noting that if there’s anything legitimately confidential in the memo, it’s hard to tell: it’s more of a very extended ‘if you see something, say something’ pamphlet than anything else, and contains the kind of advice that’s common sense worth reinforcing: “be aware of and report unattended vehicles,” “stagger search times and patterns to impede surveillance,” that kind of thing.
Still, it’s an interesting insight into the kind of official language used to acknowledge and inform broadly within the FBI and Homeland Security on something they seem to be taking pretty seriously.
fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek
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