It seems al Qaeda is not amused, because Americans didn’t take Adam Gadahn’s threatening video, seriously.
The Debka File has picked up these messages from al Qaeda websites:
“They will soon realize their mistake when American cities are hit by quality operations,” said one message.
Another said the attacks would be carried out “by means of trucks loaded with radio-active material against America’s biggest city and financial nerve center.”
A third message mentioned New York, Los Angeles and Miami as targets. It drew the answer: “The attack, with Allah’s help, will cause an economic meltdown, many dead, and a financial crisis on a scale that compels the United States to pull its military forces out of many parts of the world, including Iraq, for lack of any other way of cutting down costs.”
Homeland Security appears to be taking this seriously, as reported by WNBC New York:
Authorities were taking extra counterterrorism precautions Friday in response to what they said was an unsubstantiated radiological threat to the city.Officials said they had not changed the city’s terror alert status in response to the online chatter mentioning a truck packed with radioactive material. Police had deployed extra radiological sensors on street, water and air patrols, and were stopping vehicles at checkpoints in lower Manhattan and around the city.
Reuters is also reporting the extra precautionary steps being taken in NYC:
New York police played down the increased security.
“It is stressed that these deployments are strictly precautionary and not the result of any verified threat,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said in a statement.
And Bloomberg also sought to soothe New Yorkers.
“Earlier this evening, the NYPD began taking several public precautionary measures visible to New Yorkers to guard against an unverified threat that was found on the Internet,” he said.
Debka notes:
But it is important to note that the exchange of messages took place over al Qaeda’s internal Internet sites and that they contained the threat of radioactive terror and specific American cities for the first time after a long silence on these subjects.
Before you laugh this off entirely, keep in mind that Debka isn’t the only one concerned about a dirty bomb attack.
In an 8/7 interview, James Woolsey said:
“I think the threat of a serious attack in the next few months is very real,” Woolsey said. A terrorist strike with a dirty bomb or with biological weapons was “a real possibility.” Woolsey’s comments echo those of FBI Director Robert Mueller, who told NewsMax in May that al-Qaida’s paramount goal is clear: to detonate a nuclear device that would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The Debka File also reports that a growing number of clips on al Qaeda sites are instructing would be jihadists how to design remote-controlled gliders, pack them with explosives, and launch them against predetermined targets.
H/T: Riehl World View