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CNN Live At Daybreak
America Strikes Back: Next Terrorist Attack Could Be on Infrastructure
Aired October 16, 2001 - 08:16 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: The FBI put America on alert for another possible terrorist attack here in the United States. One security expert believes the next attack could involve an assault on the nation's infrastructure. In this week's Baron's, Dr. George Friedman sets a chilling scenario.
He says -- quote -- "imagine if somebody were able to blow up one of the major oil refineries along the Houston ship channel where a substantial portion of the country's refinery capacity is located. The entire row of refineries could blow like Chinese firecrackers and the resulting pall cast over Houston would make the metro area unlivable for a significant period of time".
Dr. George Friedman, an expert on national security joins us to talk more about this. Good morning. Thanks for being with us sir.
DR. GEORGE FRIEDMAN, EXPERT ON NATIONAL SECURITY: Good to be here.
ZAHN: So if you figure that the Houston ship channel is vulnerable, I would assume someone within the U.S. government has taken note of that threat as well. What is being done about it?
FRIEDMAN: Well I assume they have taken note of it and I suspect that al Qaeda and bin Laden have thought about it as well. I'm sure the security measures have been taken, but the essential problem is this. Al Qaeda can choose among a large target set -- where they're going to strike next.
It's extremely difficult to protect everything and therefore, what is most important is try to penetrate al Qaeda to find out what their intentions are. If we're to believe the public statements that are coming out of the FBI right now, which may or may not be true, we haven't had very much luck in penetrating them. So we're kind of playing blind man's bluff. They can come just about anywhere and we're not sure where it's going to be next.
ZAHN: Well let's talk about the difficulty that America has right now in penetrating this organization because you've wrote -- written a lot over the years about that -- because you say that Osama bin Laden isn't sort of interested in one large brand operation. He's very good at taking small disparate cells and planting them all over the place and then eventually having them work in tandem . Describe that to us.
FRIEDMAN: Well you know, he studied what happened in the 1970s and 1980s to terrorists, when the Israelis took them out and he's realized that a highly centralized organization is very vulnerable. So what he's basically done is to create -- I call it a series of task forces, that have deployed early into the country, into the United States, well before the attacks that don't know very much about each other.
They might not know anything about each other except that other groups are operating and that are set about to kind of develop their own attacks. And as one group is utilized as let's call it task force A on September 11th and they carry out their task, task force B, C, D, the others kind of come up in readiness and start preparing to operate.
One of the things we've seen is the attack on September 11th. Now we've seen the anthrax attacks, which I'll make an assumption, has something to do with bin Laden and there may be other task forces. You penetrate one -- you break it up. It doesn't give you much information about the others.
ZAHN: All right, now why do you make the assumption that Osama bin Laden has something to do with these anthrax scares?
FRIEDMAN: Well we had September 11th. We haven't had very much anthrax in the past century. Suddenly we're having events all over the place. One of the letters comes in from Malaysia. It's very difficult to see what other group would have the motivation to do it. Certainly bin Laden does have the motivation to do it,
Unless it's the most extraordinary coincidence we've seen in a very long time, I'll have to make the assumption, at least the working assumption, that he is involved.
ZAHN: Dr. Friedman, before we let you go, talk to us too -- we should explain that your organization strapped sort of considered a private clausy CIA. You analyze an awful lot of data on the Internet. We've heard the government talk about securing dams, the water supply.
How vulnerable are those two things?
FRIEDMAN: Well water supply is not as vulnerable as it looks because it takes huge amounts of poisons and chemicals to take out your water supply. The pumping stations might be -- more to the point, a large city depends on the ability to pump water. There are some nodes that you could take out.
We have lots of systems that are vulnerable. Some of them can recover very fast. Some of them take a long time to recover. As we take a look at what bin Laden might choose, he'd want to attack things that one, kill a lot of people and two, degrade the system for an extended period of time.
If you take a look at the World Trade Center, it was from his point of view, the perfect operation. It not only killed a lot of people. It shut down the U.S. financial markets for four days and took several points off our gross domestic product.
That's the kind of attack he wants to do and that's what he's looking for next.
ZAHN: Dr. Friedman, what I don't want us to do is leave people with any sense of alarm that the Houston ship channel is going to be wiped out any time soon or the dam or the water systems ...
FRIEDMAN: Right.
ZAHN: ... just a final thought this morning on how Americans should put all of these potential scenarios into perspective.
FRIEDMAN: Well in the first place, we should remember that I'm talking about is speculation. There's no special intelligence on this. What we're doing is extrapolating from what went before to what might happen. Secondly, we have to remember that for all the problems we have an outstanding intelligence service and a security service and they are now on the job and working 24 hours a day.
And finally we have to remember that in war there are risks. We are at war and that even if something were to happen, the United States is an extraordinarily resilient country. We've been through a lot in the past, and we can survive an awful lot and can deal out pretty well too.
ZAHN: All right, Dr. George Friedman, thank you very much for your insights this morning.
FRIEDMAN: Thank you.
ZAHN: Appreciate you dropping by.
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