I’ve long feared that malls are an easy target for a terrorist group, even with mall security in place at many malls. In my nonwriting incarnation I have done many events at malls and it’s clear some have better security than others. The Daily Beast raises the issue of why Americans should be following and seriously pondering the attack in Kenya by a group affiliated with Al Qaeda in which 59 have been butchered:
The terrorist slaughter and siege in a Nairobi shopping mall may be just a taste of things to come in the United States. The headlines from overseas over the last couple of days—a suicide attack on a Christian church in Pakistan; horrific bombings in Iraq—can seem like background noise in distant lands. But they should be reminders that the threat many Americans thought was behind them continues with a vengeance. Osama bin Laden is dead, yes, but the Al Qaeda ideology that preaches hatred for non-believers and a special loathing for the United States lives on. It has spread like a disease, and the infection—terror—is still out there.
One example of the global impact could be seen almost immediately on the streets of New York as news broke of events in Nairobi. Squads of patrol cars on heightened alert swarmed around possible terror targets in Manhattan, and the so-called “Hercules” teams of the NYPD, trained and outfitted for urban combat in the case of a terrorist attack, were deployed as well. “There is no specific threat to the city,” said John McCarthy, the NYPD spokesman, but “we keep track of events as they unfold across the globe and we adjust our counter-terrorism program accordingly.”
The fact that the core Al Qaeda organization and its many affiliates are under huge pressure from American drone attacks, U.S. Special Forces operations, and multinational military offensives is not exactly a consolation. There is a long record showing that when these groups are cornered on their home turf, they try harder than ever to take revenge on their enemies abroad. Their regional designs fail and their global ambitions increase. Many analysts thought bin Laden was on the ropes in early 2001. He and his acolytes and allies had tried to build revolutionary movements in Algeria and Egypt, and they’d suffered utter defeat. The September 11 attacks were plotted, not least, to prove they could still be effective.
And here’s why the mall attack should be of special concern:
The Al-Shabaab link is of particular concern in the United States. The group has attracted scores of young Americans to its ranks over the years, most but not all of them of Somali origin. One nightmare scenario for counter-terror officials would be for some of them to return to the United States with their guerrilla and terrorist skills.
In Minnesota, the Mall of America reportedly holds lockdown drills for employees twice a month. These are mainly a precaution against random violence, like the shootings in Washington last week. But even before Kenya, everyone in the counter-terror business was aware that the Mall of America could be a terrorist target, and it’s not irrelevant that many young men from the large Somali-American community in Minneapolis have joined Al-Shabaab in the past.
How, exactly, do you guard against people willing to slaughter innocents as they work, or shop or play, far from any battlefield or confrontation?
That is a question still being debated in the United States, where the means used to gather intelligence about terrorist activities—which went almost unquestioned after 9/11—have now become the focus of angry public scrutiny. The National Security Agency’s massive data mining of telephone and Internet communications, revealed in detail by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has caused great public concern about privacy.
It ends with this quote from NYPD commissioner, Ray Kelly:
“The threat of terrorism is as great, if not greater, than it was before the World Trade Center was destroyed,” Kelly warned in a speech earlier this month. “From Al Qaeda’s perspective, the war it waged on the streets of Lower Manhattan on 9/11 continues in theaters from the U.S., to Europe, to Indonesia to West Africa.” Kelly listed several plots over the last ten months “with a nexus to New York City,” including the plan by the Boston Marathon bombers to carry out further attacks in Manhattan. Yet, as Kelly noted, not a single one of the candidates running for mayor of New York this month asked for a briefing from the police, or offered a picture of how they plan to protect the city. It was as if they thought the threat had gone away.
In fact, we should all be giving the question of how to address this menace some new and serious thought. The Bush administration’s “global war on terror” may be over, but the terrorists’ global war on us is not.
And it won’t be over because of the ability for even a freelancer to use technology (newer and more advanced or even more traditional technology) to inflict great damage.
Hopefully, malls throughout the United States will fine tune their security because Kenya shows it’s an unfortunately fruitful place for terroists to get what they want: a body count, to get publicity.
And terrorists have thought about attacking malls in the U.S. before. From the Boston
Globe in 2009:
A 27-year-old Sudbury man allegedly plotted to launch a terrorist attack on a shopping mall in which he and his fellow conspirators would mow down civilians with automatic weapons, federal authorities said today as they announced his arrest.
Desiring to take “some kind of action in furtherance of jihad,” Tarek Mehanna and his co-conspirators had multiple conversations about obtaining weapons and randomly shooting people in a mall, including discussions of the logistics of the mall attacks, assaulting from different entrances, and attacking emergency responders, acting US Attorney Michael Loucks said.
Federal authorities said Mehanna’s arrest early this morning at his Sudbury residence had foiled plots to launch terrorist attacks both inside and outside the United States. Read the affidavit here.
Mehanna, who faces a charge of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, was ordered held without bail until an Oct. 30 detention hearing at his initial appearance this afternoon before US Magistrate Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston. He conspired with Ahmad Abousamra, who left the country for Syria several years ago, and others, Loucks said in a news conference at his office in Boston.
Mehanna was first arrested and charged a year ago with lying to FBI agents in a terrorism investigation. “Today’s arrest, done in conjunction with a search of his home, involves broader and more serious charges,” Loucks said.
The conspirators also discussed attacking two members of the executive branch, Loucks said. Those people are no longer in the executive branch and “neither were in any danger at any time from Mehanna or his co-conspirators,” he emphasized.
From The National Terrorism Alert website, which is not affiliated with the government, in 2010″:
America’s shopping malls could be among the next major terrorist targets according to a compelling article written by J.R Dunn on the American Thinker website.
Malls make such obvious high-value targets that it’s difficult to grasp why they haven’t been hit up until now. Shopping malls are America’s marketplaces, constantly packed with people, with uncontrolled entry, and openly vulnerable to any given form of attack. We need only consider the darkest days of the Iraqi terror campaign of 2006-2007 to grasp how the jihadis view marketplaces. Scarcely a week went by without another Iraqi marketplace bombing, with casualties largely consisting of women and children, mounting from the dozens to the hundreds. We need only add the fact that the mall in many ways symbolizes the United States to people across the world, acting as kind of American Horn of Plenty, to see the inevitability of the threat. Such attacks will come, and they will be ugly.
Not a certainty — but no longer such an unthinkable target in light of Nairobi and of vulnerability.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.