The Times Square Car Bomb: 5 Lessons from Britain (Hewitt)

EA correspondent Steve Hewitt, one of Britain's top specialists on counter-terrorism, writes:

The media is abuzz this morning with news of a defused car bomb left in New York City's Times Square, either in an indiscriminate attempt to kill or maim random civilians, a directed attack against the building housing Viacom, the maker of South Park (under threat over its depiction of the Prophet Mohammad), or both.

What the media hasn’t noted yet are the similarities between this effort and a failed attack in London almost three years ago. In the early morning of 29 June 2007, smoke was noticed billowing out of a car parked outside of a packed nightclub in London. Inside were gas cylinders, petrol, and nails. The makeshift bomb failed to explode but the emerging smoke, as in the case in New York, brought the car to the attention of authorities.

Eventually, the plot was traced to Scotland. Two of those involved attempted another makeshift attack by ramming a vehicle packed full of petrol into a terminal at Glasgow Airport. One of the attackers was badly burned and subsequently died, while the other was arrested and later convicted and sentenced to 32 years in prison.

Points of Possible Relevance to the New York Case

1. The London and Glasgow attacks involved a small group of amateur terrorists, including doctors, with grievances against the "West", particularly over the invasion of Iraq, but, thankfully, without the expertise and training to successfully carry out the attacks.

2. Although there was media talk of Al Qa'eda and the individuals as Al Qa'eda-inspired, no links were demonstrated. For instance, the London attack did not involve a suicide attack, usually an Al-Qa'eda characteristic. The later Glasgow attack was a suicide attack out of desperation as the authorities closed in on the plot members.

This is not to rule out the possibility of at least Al-Qa'eda inspiration in the failed New York attack. Al-Qaeda recently called for more small-scale attacks, a sign of the difficulty it has had in carrying out large-scale attacks in the last few years.

3. The nature of the bomb reflects innovation caused by increasing restrictions on other materials used in more devastating attacks, such as fertilizer that went into the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

4. The nature of this attack speaks to the inability to secure “soft” targets in free societies, but it also points to the difficulty of mounting attacks of a 9-11 scale in a post-9-11 world. The future of terrorism in western countries may well be of similar type attacks carried out by self-starters radicalized over the Internet.

5. The authorities in New York will be following up as those in London did: tracing where the SUV came from, looking for eyewitnesses who might have noticed its appearance, searching the vehicle for forensic evidence, and examining CCTV footage from the area to see who left the vehicle. If the parallel of amateurs in the London case exists in New York, considerable evidence to the identity of those responsible will have been left and arrests will soon occur. The fear of the authorities will be that other attacks may be amounted before this occurs.