Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 | 11:14 a.m.
UNLV Political Science Department Chairman Ted Jelen said this morning that today's bombings in New York City and elsewhere came to him as no surprise.
"I'm surprised it took so long," Jelen said. "Obviously, this has been a probability for quite some time. It was a low-tech attack in the sense that this didn't require a lot of pricey technology. All you had to do was hijack an airplane."
Jelen said that while it would be natural to blame the incidents on Middle Eastern extremists, he also cautioned against jumping to conclusions until more information becomes available. He said the timing of the attack may have had to do with the fact that Congress went back to work after Labor Day.
"You can do the most damage in New York in terms of maximum number of people and in terms of the economy," Jelen said. "I think these were actually picked targets. I would not expect such an attack in Las Vegas because this is not a place where foreign policy is made."
"I expect the Bush administration would like to retaliate very drastically, but we still don't know who did this. Usually, when the people responsible have come from the Middle East, they have quickly claimed responsibility."
With few exceptions, most terrorism on U.S. soil has been committed by domestic special interest groups or individual Americans who once belonged to a cause, only to see that cause dissipate.
"Terrorism these days in the United States tends to be by racist and anti-Semetic groups or lone wolves," professor Leonard Weinberg of the University of Nevada, Reno, told the Las Vegas Sun in May. "It has to do with the increasing cultural and social diversity in this country, which is certainly true of Las Vegas and Reno."
It is because of such incidents that Lt. Martin Lehtinen, emergency management coordinator for Metro Police, said law enforcement likes to receive advance notice on conventions that have the potential to draw protests.
"We've got known groups that come through the valley on a regular basis but there's nothing definitive right now," Lehtinen said in May of potential terrorists. "We're not going to know about someone like that unless we stumble onto them. We've stopped people who had pipe bombs. But just because people have weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean they will commit a terrorist act."
Jeffrey Beatty, president of Total Security Services International Inc. of Marietta, Ga., and a featured speaker at a tourism safety conference in Las Vegas last spring, told the Sun at the time that the type of convention topics that could draw opponents include genetic engineering, globalization, politics, medicine and world bank issues.
"These are the types of things that would attract people to make a political statement," Beatty said. "It would be unwise for a city like Las Vegas to think that they didn't have to plan for such contested events. But I believe the police in Las Vegas are doing their job."
Lehtinen said another concern law enforcement agencies share away from the Strip is the potential for terrorism should the federal government select Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the nation's repository for high-level nuclear waste. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also is studying this issue.
"If they start transporting nuclear waste into our valley, what's to stop somebody from blowing up one of our trucks?" Lehtinen said.
He said law enforcement agencies are vigilant of the fact that Las Vegas is also a potential target for foreign terrorism because of the large number of non-Americans who visit here.
Foreign terrorism on U.S. soil has been rare. Two notable exceptions include the deadly 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York City by Islamic extremists and the 1999 capture of an Algerian national caught smuggling explosives into Washington state.
Beatty said it is easier for foreign terrorists to strike American targets overseas where they may be more vulnerable. But in May he did not discount the likelihood of a foreign terrorist attack on U.S. soil coming from the likes of Middle Eastern groups or from Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult responsible for the 1995 chemical nerve agent sarin attack that killed 12 and injured 6,000 in a Tokyo subway.
"Domestic terrorist groups do not want to cause casualties among ma and pa Americans so they do not target the general population," Beatty said. "But foreign terrorists don't give a damn."
After the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in April 1995, federal, state and local authorities examined ways to beef up security in Nevada's public buildings. The Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse that opened last year at 333 Las Vegas Blvd. South was one of the nation's first federal buildings constructed with new blast-resistance standards following the bombing.
Metro, as well as other local law enforcement agencies and medical professionals, also have benefitted from federal funding by training employees to respond to terrorist attacks. The training involves biological, chemical and nuclear material.
Mike Myers, a training officer for the Las Vegas Fire Department, is preparing a medical response plan for terrorist and other mass-disaster incidents that he hopes to have operational for the valley by the end of 2002.
"If it happened in Las Vegas today, there would be some difficulties," Myers told the Sun in May regarding medical response. "The worst problems would be with hospital overcrowding and lack of ability by the hospitals to handle decontamination on a mass scale."
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