SECURITY
MUST BE TOP PRIORITY
'2013
Security Officer of the Year': One World Trade Center guard Abdul Basher
'exercises' his eyes while on duty at the
nation's tallest skyscraper
and site of the 9/11 terror atrocity
Updated Sunday March 30, 2014
TAGS:
1 WORLD TRADE CENTER SECURITY BREECHES, DRUNKEN SECRET SERVICE AGENTS,
COMMANDERS
AND SERVICE MEN MANNING NUCLEAR ARSENAL INCOMPETENT,
AMERICAN
MILITARY STILL LEARNING HOW TO CONDUCT
ASYMMETRICAL
WARFARE, THE FALSE ILLUSION OF SECURITY,
1WTC
SECURITY OUTSOURCED TO LOWEST BIDDER,
OSAMA
BIN LADEN’S SON IN LAW CONVICTED IN NY SUPERIOR COURT
(Wednesday March 26, 2014 Reade
& Church St., NYC) From this corner
in Lower Manhattan almost equidistant from the New York State Supreme
Courthouse and One World Trade Center, two stories were playing out each oddly
linked to the other. It was, however, a
case of good news and bad news; very bad news indeed. In the Courthouse Osama bin Laden’s
son-in-law, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, the highest ranking al-Qaeda member to be
tried in an American court, was convicted on all counts related to the
conspiracy to kill Americans and the actual attack of September 11, 2001
itself.
A few blocks to the south at
the site of 1 World Trade Center, just a week after a 16 year old high school
student from New Jersey managed to gain access to the spire atop this new
imposing structure, the lack of vigilant security and ineptitude was again
illustrated in a cell phone camera captured picture of a security guard, a
“half-blind” security guard at that, was photographed while asleep at the main
entrance to the site. Apparently
security at the site is not a high priority but rather a matter of contracting
the lowest bidder.
The bad news side of the
equation really began to tip the scale downward as it was revealed that three
members of the Secret
Service contingent assigned to, the once thought to be elite, Counter
Assault Team (CAT) who had been sent to The Netherlands prior to President
Obama’s visit to The Hague, had been on a drinking binge that ended with one
Agent passed out in a hotel hallway a mere six hours before they were to report
for duty. This is the third such
incident of blatantly indiscriminate behavior by those tasked with providing
security from the President of the United States; a task that has been
exponentially more challenging from the earliest days of Obama’s presidential
campaign in 2007. No other candidate or
president has ever received more death threats and required more proactive
measures from the Secret Service than the first African American to run for the
highest Office in our land and become President.
While in The Hague President
Obama participated in the Nuclear Security Summit along with 24 other heads of
state. It was after one of these
sessions that President Obama dismissed the recent incursion of Russian troops
into Crimea stating that his most immediate threat was a “nuclear bomb going
off in Manhattan”, not the Russia/Ukraine/Crimea situation.
Concerning nuclear weapons we
learned this week that the men and women serving in isolated bunkers deep
beneath the topsoil of military bases in Montana and North Dakota and elsewhere,
had regularly cheated on monthly proficiency exams, that one top Commander,
while on a visit to Russia last year was seen in the company of young Russian
women while he was obviously extremely intoxicated and speaking about the
physics of our nuclear arsenal. By
the end of the week he, along with nine other Commanders and 34 junior
Officers were dismissed, resigned or reassigned. The moral and competency of the men and women
who literally have access to our over 19,000 ICBM nuclear tipped missiles has
now become of great concern. Endemic
among those who serve in these highly technical and dreadfully monotonous posts
is a sense that their “mission” is “useless”; that they are kept on a constant
state of high alert while no threat is present.
As one Air Force Colonel who asked to speak anonymously stated, “We are
fairly certain that there will not ever come a time when we will be called upon
to carry out the specifics of our well-defined mission. Year after year we train and train and have
come to recognize that we perform a function, that we represent a segment of
our Military arsenal that is highly unlikely ever going to be called upon. This fact alone saps the morale from all of us
living underground.”
ENDEMIC INEPTITUDE
If there is one common thread
linking the last five paragraphs it is systemic failures of an egregious
nature. As our troops continue to die in
remote corners of Afghanistan, the threat of “home grown” terrorists increases,
and we work with other governments to secure the various stockpiles of nuclear
material around the world, we are confronted with an alarming reality to say
the least. Anyone of the episodes above
is cause for serious concern; collectively they represent a complete lack of respect
for the perils in the real world, in real time, affecting real people. Just as Americans awoke to a new reality on
September 12, 2001 with stunned disbelief that a small band of terrorists were
able to pull such a diabolically calculated attack, we would learn in the
weeks, months and years after that, essentially, no one was “minding the store”. For all the untold trillions of dollars the
federal government has invested in the bottomless pits of the Intelligence and
Law Enforcement Community from the CIA. DIA, NSA, NRO, and all the other “alphabet
agencies”, the post 9-11 era revealed ineptitude of such a profound nature in
the all the federal Agencies and Departments including those mentioned above, that
the entire apparatus of securing our country was fatally flawed.
Once the raging stallions of
non-state sponsored terrorism, asymmetrical warfare and the complexities of
waging a guerrilla war with radical insurgents were already out of the proverbial
barnyard there was no coaxing them back.
We were in a new age indeed. As
is typical of modern day Congress, they exercised their knee-jerk reactions and
passed with staggering haste bills and legislation that created new Agencies
and rounded up an array of 22 existing diverse Agencies and created the Department
of Homeland Security, a Cabinet level post as well as the Director of National
Intelligence. This Hodge-podge shotgun
marriage among Agencies so institutionally ossified and vehemently territorial
proved to be an awkward, cumbersome beast.
But as the years have come and gone since that immediate post 9-11-01
period when all of America was attuned to the sense of hyper-awareness and
appeared ready to do whatever was asked of them, soon the security measures
became nuisances; time consuming wastes of time. Once the threat of another strike on our own
soil by some terrorist group began to seem less plausible, slowly but surely we
let our guard down, we dropped our hands as quickly as a winded boxer in the
last round.
THOSE WHO FORGET TO REMEMBER…
As has become glaringly
evident since 9-11-01 is that we, our government, military, diplomatic corps and
intelligence machinery, for all its hi-tech sophistication and capabilities
never did and continues to not have any practical knowledge of those with whom
we are engaged in this “war on terror”.
We have scant understanding of the vast societal, cultural and
historical differences between us and, when it comes to a theater of combat
such as the notoriously ungovernable land of Afghanistan were tribal and
familiar alliances are centuries old, we are at a loss. When we finally remove the last of our troops
from Afghanistan after a13 years of military engagement, in short order there will
be no evidence that we had ever been there aside from the billions of dollars’
worth of military hardware and infrastructure that is too costly for us to
remove.
Even in the much more
familiarly comfortable conventional methods of combat and defense we have over
six decades of experience with, the failures of those charged with overseeing
our huge stockpile of nuclear tipped bombs, was another stunner of epic
proportions. Beginning with the creation
of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the Strategic Air
Command (SAC) we have maintained underground silos, subterranean military bases
carved into the deep bedrock of the west and Midwest of the United States
tasked with being able to deliver nuclear Armageddon within
minutes of a Presidential directive.
Learning of the systemic corruption employed in these still active but,
in reality, more relics of our Cold War past, in light of global instability
and the Russian annexation of Crimea, was chilling.
As Joseph Cirincione, the
president of the Ploughshares Fund, an organization committed to nuclear disarmament
and non-proliferation said last week on MSNBC, “The men and women in those bunkers
have a thankless job. Their commanders
know and they know they are preparing for a mission they will never be called
upon to fulfill. Morale is poor all the
way down the line. The entire nuclear stockpile should be decommissioned and
significantly reduced. Nuclear war is so
unlikely to happen.” While it is true
that the United States may never engage an enemy in conventional warfare such
as in World War II, there is no imperative at any level of the federal
government, the Department of Defense and other vested interests to relinquish
our nuclear superiority as part of a pact or treaty. We’ll keep our nukes, thank you.
SACRED GROUND UNGUARDED
From the day in 1966 that the
first demolitions of existing structures began to clear a 16 acre of Lowe
Manhattan for the World Trade Center, that plot of NYC has been high value real
estate. As the Twin Towers climbed ever
higher for years many said no one will be willing to work in an office so high
in the sky. The architect, Minoru
Yamasaki, himself uncomfortable with height, designed two building with
exterior cladding interspersed by window no larger than 22 inches. This was an ingenious solution in that the
very narrow windows enabled workers to be more comfortable and less distracted
in the highest stories of those Towers than other architectural proposals had
specified. Yamasaki found a kindred
spirit and an intellectual peer in the young structural engineer from Worthington,
Skilling, Helle, and Jackson (WSHJ), Leslie Robertson who brought Yamasaki’s
grand vision to fruition while advancing constructing and engineering
techniques that revolutionized how engineers thought about building big. Within 14 months of the Twin Towers opening over
78% of its office space was leased.
In a wrenchingly sad twist of
fate Leslie Robertson observed the fully fueled passenger jets deliberately
smash into the towers he had built. As
the steel warped from the lack of protective fire resistant foam, thousands of
gallons of highly flammable aviation fuel, the fire stressed infrastructure
succumbed to the elements and with an almost diabolically directed “pancaking
effect” both of the Towers were reduced to 16 acres of smoldering rubble and
the 7 subterranean levels had turned into a hell on earth for those trapped
there when the Towers above them collapsed and sealed their fates.
One would think that almost a
full 13 years later, after 11 years of constructing a new soaring structure,
this time a single sublimely angular tower, that this 16 acre construction site
would be among the most vigilantly guarded and secure as any of the other
numerous and symbolic structures in our City.
But, incomprehensively, one would be mistaken; astonishingly mistaken.
A photograph appeared in our
NYC local newspapers and on the TV news late last week of a security guard, Abdul
Basher, 65, an employee of the subcontractor, Durst Organization Property
Management, who is tasked with providing security for this hallowed site. Basher, leaning back wearing sunglasses was apparently
sound asleep at his post; a post that was in fact the primary entry to the
building itself. By his own admission he
is “half blind” and has difficulties seeing “people and sometimes stairs.” So this is what it has all devolved to? As much as 1 World Trade Center is a 1776
foot testament to our New Yorker Pride, our strength and defiance in the faces
of the cowards who brought our old Giant 11 down, it is for many holy, blood
soaked ground. To learn that the security of this site had
been outsourced by billionaires to the lowest bidder was just another worm in
the apple.
A NATURAL TARGET
On a cold overcast February
26, 1993, the first attack on our Twin Towers was perpetrated. Fortunately the terrorists responsible for
this act were not as ambitious in their plot nor as astute in their planning as
the attackers of September 11, 2001.
However, what they were, what their crime was did little to rattled the
cages of those in the federal government to pay attention to an increasingly
looming threat. That ragtag band of
terrorists lead by a master bomb maker, Ramzi Yousef, whose uncle is the
admitted mastermind behind the 9-11-01 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), were
unable to bring our Towers down but eight years later they witnessed success
beyond their wildest dreams.
As any domestic security
expert or analysts will say for the public record, 1 World Trade Center will be
a choice target for this new generation of terrorists. Given the dynamics within unstable nations
and simmering anti-American tension across the globe, it is safe to say that
someone, at this very minute, in a city or rural enclave is already plotting the
next attack on NYC and certainly, the defiant middle finger to the rest of the
world that is 1 World Trade Center, as their primary target.
As has been reported in the
local media recently there was a contentious turf battle for jurisdiction over the
task of providing security for 1 WTC between the Port Authority Police (PAPD)
and the New York City Police Department (NYPD).
The Port Authority eventually won that territorial dispute and now, in
light of recent gross lapses in securing the site, there may in fact be a
jurisdictional review to access what Agency or Agencies will be the primary Law
Enforcement Agency at the site, the memorial plaza and surrounding surface
streets. Since the PATH trains that
connect New York City to New Jersey have historically been the sole domain of
the PAPD, that mission will be continued.
The PAPD currently are the
lone providers to much of the infrastructure of the NYC – North Jersey
metropolitan area including, side from the PATH trains, all three major
airports, two huge bus terminals and the tunnels and bridges that link NYC to
NJ over or under the Hudson River. It seems
obvious that the PAPD should retain the jurisdictional imperative at all the
sites they have historically presided including the new 1 WTC. How they had somehow ceded security control
from the site to some half-assed rent-a-cop outfit is beyond comprehension.
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?
So, in the time elapsed in one
seven day period we have learned about extremely distressing realities; we now
know our President is in danger due to drunken Secret Service Agents, that our
nuclear stockpile is staffed by unqualified, disillusioned, over stressed
airmen and women, that a partially blind security guard was the first line of
defense at the most sacred ground in NYC if not all of the USA and, by the way,
our CIA had completely once again failed to connect the dots as Russian
President Vladimir Putin presided over a sham referendum in Crimea wresting
that peninsular on the southern border of the sovereign state of Ukraine back to Russian control.
Iraq remains a dystopian state
with warring religious and ethnic factions hell-bent on the annihilation of
each other. On another front our puppet
drug lord, corrupt, anti-American so called “leader” of Afghanistan continues
to poke his wicked fingers into the eyes of the American Military and other
Agencies that sacrificed so much to bring some sense of order to his land. There is not a hot spot in the world where
the USA has any leverage or clout and that is the direct result of the
war-mongering, imperialist, neo-conservatives of the Cheney/Bush
administration. Despite the armed
conflicts we’ve engaged in over all these years, none of them have served to
make us any safer than we were on September 11, 2001.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK IS A HELL OF A TOWN
Without any doubt or hint of exaggeration,
one solid fact of Americana is that New York City is the premier City on the
planet. The number one destination of worldwide
tourists, and, as Howard
Cosell once said, “The City whose landmarks are known all over the
world. The center of shipping,
transportation, communications, finance, fashion and, of course entertainment”,
will always be the preeminent target in the evil eyes of those seeking to bring
us death and destruction. It is for this
reason and this reason alone that the entire spectrum of homeland security,
intelligence gathering and analysis, signal intelligence and constant vigilance
must be maintained.
Ask any terrorism expert, any
talking head from a think tank or, for that matter, any NYPD member, and they will
to a person tell you their most earnest and frightful belief is that al Qaeda
or some derivative thereof is patiently biding their time; watching and waiting
for their next opportunity to bring their jihad
to American soil.
Until we shore up our security
efforts at every level of government we will remain an open target. Having lived through the hours, days and
weeks after our Twin Towers where toppled, it is an ominous reality that so
many Agencies and their personnel can be asleep at the wheel at the same time.
The stakes are very high; the
threat level while difficult to assess day to day is omnipresent and the
consequences could be far worse than all we lived through on September 11, 2001
and since.
Lest we forget; lest our
government forget.
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