Terrorism Made Easy

Failures of Imagination – Michael McCaul (Crown Forum)

Rather than pointing a finger of blame at one political party or another for the events of 9-11-2001, members the 9-11 Commission placed the responsibility for the government’s failure to prevent the 9-11 attack on a “failure of imagination.” The intelligence services of this country, at all levels are charged with the primary task the safety of the country, and they failed to foresee the potential of this kind of attack.

As part of the response to 9-11 the newly created Department of Homeland Security created the Red Cell teams, which utilized a wide array of folks from a multitude of backgrounds, both within and outside government to imagine a variety of scenarios for potential future terrorist attacks and the response to prevent those attacks. Red Cell utilized the creative skills of thriller writers like Brad Thor and Brad Meltzer.

 

Now, Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX) the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, an outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s policies for battling terrorism has collected a series of potential scenarios in the new book, Failures of Imagination, in an effort to illustrate how the lack of serious focus and leadership on these kinds of potential attacks puts us all at risk.  

Each of these deeply detailed scenarios ring with a plausible authenticity and range from attacks at Disney’s Magic Kingdom, to the Mall of America and a bit of “unfinished business” with a decapitation strike against the U.S. Capitol. The book reads like a how to guide to terror, with significant action steps that can easily be followed that is sure to make this an ISIS bestseller.

While the scenarios are disturbing, what makes them even more scary is the Obama Administration’s utter lack of competence when it comes to treating terrorism as a serious threat and the chilling stupidity of their policy to not treat radical Islamists as a viable threat to our national security.