Threat of IEDs growing at home

My SanAntonio.com ^ | July 29, 2012 | Stewar Powell

[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

[LibLieSlayer]

Amen brother.

LLS

[QT3.14]

Exaggerate the threat, scare people and before you know it
we’ll have TSA checkpoints and military patrols across the
USA. All for nothing except control (of us).

That was figured out long ago:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and hence clamorous to be led to safety)
by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,
all of them imaginary.

~ H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956) Journalist – magazine editor