Posted on 07/30/2012 4:08:57 PM PDT by AuntB
WASHINGTON — Improvised explosive devices, like those that have killed and maimed thousands of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, pose a growing threat across Texas and the United States, leading to calls for urgent cooperation between U.S. military experts and civilian law enforcement officers.
Army Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, director of the Pentagon's so-called Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, alerted Congress in classified testimony this month to the mounting IED threat at home.
He also highlighted the challenges his team faces trying to train stateside law enforcement agencies to detect, disarm and defeat the devices.
“The domestic IED threat from both homegrown terrorists and global threat networks is real and presents a significant security challenge for the United States and our international partners,” Barbero warned a subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Of 880 terrorist attacks in North and South America last year — most in Mexico and Colombia — 109 were carried out by IEDs that killed or wounded 245 people; 18 were carried out by vehicle-born IEDs that killed or wounded 180 people, according to statistics maintained by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
In the United States, there were 24 terrorist attacks last year that killed 13 people and wounded 33, according to the report by NATO's Center of Excellence for Defense Against Terrorism.
But legal restrictions on the activities of U.S. armed forces are slowing crucial collaboration, insiders complain.
Federal laws dating to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 limit the use of U.S. armed forces in domestic law enforcement and training, an impediment some members of Congress want to change.
The Pentagon's specialized $1.9 billion-a-year IED organization has “saved many servicemen's lives by teaching lessons learned in blood on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan,” say Republican Congressmen Peter King of New York, Daniel Lungren of California, and Michael McCaul of Texas, leaders of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
“Their hard-won knowledge should now be shared with American lawmen facing these same deadly threats at home.”
“To me it's crazy that the guy who is the expert on IEDs overseas can't coordinate with the Texas Rangers,” adds McCaul. “The military is unable to coordinate with state and local law enforcement, leaving a gaping hole in our security.”
Evidence of the threat has surfaced repeatedly. A car bomb was disarmed in New York City's Times Square and explosives were discovered in ink cartridges aboard two U.S.-bound commercial cargo planes in 2010. Improvised explosives in an airline passenger's underwear nearly brought down a Detroit-bound airliner in 2009.
The suspect in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre, James Holmes, deployed IEDs in his apartment, authorities said.
With Mexican drug cartels using car bombs in cities bordering Texas, officials along the southwest border are increasingly concerned about ready-to-go devices being smuggled into the United States.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw, citing the widening threat, has pressured the Pentagon to help train officers to detect IEDs and also is seeking FBI approval for the Texas Rangers to establish a statewide unit to deal with explosives.
But his efforts have run into bureaucratic resistance, according to knowledgeable officials.
“It is essential that all state troopers be skilled in the detection and interdiction of (devices), precursor chemicals and component parts,” McCraw said. Texas Rangers and DPS criminal investigation agents have training “to detect IEDs and their components in the course of their investigations, whether the targets are Mexican cartels or serial murderers,” he added.
“Deeper cooperation is absolutely essential,” insists McCaul, a former deputy state attorney general. “I think military and government lawyers are being too cautious. We want to fix that.”
stewart.powell@chron.com
People from terrorist nations...
Who would ever think IEDs could pop up here?
Imagine drone strikes against citizens being mislabeled as IED attacks. 0 regime gets to waste an effective opponent and then claim said opponent was a victim of terrorism and argue for greater control. Better yet, they can say the guy was in the act of planting a device that detonated prematurely and then use that propaganda to smear the surviving opposition and justify suppression. It’s totally tinfoil hat speculation stuff, but we do seem to live in strange times.
That’s one of the best posts ever and regrettably, it really points out why America is already finished. If we want to carry on our American idea it’s probably going to have to be elsewhere.
Sounds to me like the Libtards cooking up a new Boogy-man to excuse more Fascist Police-State bullsh*t.
IMHO.
;-\
I agree.
In the United States, there were 24 terrorist attacks last year that killed 13 people and wounded 33, according to the report by NATO's Center of Excellence for Defense Against Terrorism. then WHY were they NOT in the news??? every news story in America ALWAYS says NOT linked to it...
I’m thinking somewhere in the Caribbean.
After Obamacare is in full force, the best younger doctors will leave and set up boutique medical clinics for wealthy Americans to come to.
I figure I can be a janitor.
Five years ago I would have agreed with you, and I still wish that was the case, but I just fear it wouldn’t happen that way now.
I assume those terrorist attacks were by Tea Party members.
/s/s/
Here’s the report, unfortunately they don’t break out detail for individual events
http://www.coedat.nato.int/publications/report/Annual%202011.pdf
prolly cost a million dollars for it and it's useless... most likely by design
But if I find a muzzlem burying a bomb by my sidewalk and I report him, will they give me the Michele Bachmann izzlamophobe treatment?
Apparently they only wouldn't have been safe on the west coast, since those were the only Japanese Americans interned. For those in Hawaii and in the rest of the United States, there was no internment. Seriously, it's absurd to try to spin that as some sort of benevolent protective arrangement.
They only want to allow the army to help local law enforcement this time. Really, it’s just this one time. Honest injun...we won’t get involved local law enforcement again.
Who believes this crap?
It will in some parts of the country. When I think of deep blue states... I think of refugees fleeing a war zone. We may both be right.
LLS
This is a red herring.
“But legal restrictions on the activities of U.S. armed forces are slowing crucial collaboration, insiders complain.”
“You don’t understand! Unless we completely eliminate the Bill of Rights, we will be overrun with drug cartel child pornography terrorists who will zombiefy children with bath salts in Mosques before slaughtering them with Stand Your Ground assault rifles!”
IEDs? Seriously?
Think about this logically. If *anyone* was using IEDs in the US, who would be the targets of these IEDs?
1) School buses full of crippled orphans, or,
2) Heavily armed paramilitary police attempting to raid the home of some political opponent to the police state, who posted to some blog that “Obama is a poopy pants”?
These are the same people that think having armed combat drones patrolling our skies looking for (?) is a GREAT idea.
I am a lot less concerned about IEDs than that there are such people in our government acting as enemies of the people, trying to scare us all into living in a fishbowl.
That is what this is all about.
The politicans are setting us up for a war zone. Open borders and importing jihadists from Islamland... “Homegrown terrorists” are classified by Homeland inSecurity as conservatives.
I did not mean it in absolute terms. Certainly security was in the forefront of their minds. I think that their safety was of major concern in the decision. That is what I have been taught but as with many of the things that I have been taught... it could be another distortion. My point is still valid.
LLS
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