MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Terrorism expert eyes Times Square car bomb,” Ellis Henican , Newsday, May 3, 2010
Show people aren’t the only ones who dream of playing Broadway. So do aspiring terrorists.
“High consequence and high casualty,” Jerome Hauer was saying Sunday. “That’s what you get in New York.”
Yes, the bright lights shine for everyone.
“Think about it,” Hauer said. “When you want high impact with a terror attack, what is denser than Times Square on a hot night with tourists and New Yorkers roaming around? Plus, you’re in the media capital of the world. So anything you do will be instantly everywhere. There is clearly a message in that.”
Jerome Hauer knows.
Back in the Giuliani years, he ran the city’s Office of Emergency Management. He went on to Washington, where he was put in charge of the nation’s public-health emergency preparedness, figuring out what to do next after a chemical, biological or nuclear attack. Hauer didn’t always tell his bosses what they wanted to hear. He irritated Giuliani by warning against the mayor’s beloved Bunker in the Sky, the high-rise city command center at the World Trade Center that fell to rubble in the 9/11 terror attacks.
Hauer’s the kind of guy you want in charge when something scary’s about to happen – or just has. Sunday, all his attention was on the Times Square SUV bomb. He said be skeptical of any early claims of international responsibility – whether from al-Qaida, the Pakistani Taliban or any other known terror groups.
“Al-Qaida has made it clear,” he said. “They want their next attack to be more spectacular than 9/11. That is why I don’t think this is al-Qaida. It’s most likely an isolated person who wanted his 15 minutes of fame and didn’t quite have the knowledge to do it effectively. This was someone who might have sympathy with al-Qaida but certainly doesn’t appear to have been directed by them.”
Which isn’t to say it couldn’t have been awful.
“Propane gas has an explosive power of 240 to 1,” Hauer said. “For every bit of gas, you’re talking about an explosion that will produce 240 times more energy – quite an explosive cloud.”
But if the bomb maker’s incompetence was the lucky part, the city’s response was more a matter of hard-won experience and skill. Apparently, we’ve been learning something as America’s prime terror target.
The T-shirt vendor saw something and said something.
The mounted police officer “knew exactly what needed to be done,” Hauer said. “Cleared the area. Got the people out of harm’s way. Summoned help in there quickly. Isolated the threat. Took out the components that were harmful. Took the rest of the vehicle to a forensics lab in Queens. The other city agencies were called in. Everyone cooperated. All of them did what they were trained to do. They did it extremely well.”
And even though Times Square’s many security cameras didn’t deter anything – they rarely do – they are providing valuable forensic evidence.
“This response,” Hauer said, “is the kind of thing you put into a training manual.”
The next big questions for investigators?
“Was this a single, isolated incident, which it seems to be, or are there more coming?” he asked. “Is this really just a lone wolf? Or are there other people who are part of some splinter group or cell with the same ambitions?”
Now there’s something scary to think about.
E-mail ellis@henican.com. Follow him at twitter.com/henican.
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