Police inspected buses that passed near the Capitol on Thursday, and armed officers in bulletproof vests patrolled subway stations with the help of dogs. In New York, local police working the midnight shift were kept on duty after quitting time, providing thousands of extra officers to patrol the transit system and the British Consulate.
Bathrooms in all 43 Bay Area Rapid Transit system stations in the San Francisco area were closed. Transit police began a series of BART station security sweeps at 6:15 a.m. PT, while an intercom warned passengers on the West Coast's largest transit system to be on the alert.
Across the nation, security was tightened as the Bush administration raised the terror alert level on Thursday to Code Orange, or high, for the nation's mass-transit systems after the bombings in London that occurred just before 4 a.m. ET.(Related video: Washington tightens security)
The alert applies to subways, metropolitan bus systems and rail lines. Commuters were urged to be on the lookout for suspicious packages or activity.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said he knows of "no credible information" of any attack aimed at U.S. targets and described the increased security as "a measured response" to the London attacks.
"Obviously, we are concerned about the possibility of a copycat attack," he said. (Related video: More from Chertoff)
About 26 million commuters ride trains, buses and subways to work every day in the USA. A third of them work in the New York area.
Let's face it. Our Homeland Security system is a joke. Here we are closing the bathrooms at BART stations--closing bathrooms--while ships come into this country's ports all the time with thousands of containers, unsearched. We have created this massive Homeland Security Department, which oversees hundreds of federal agencies such as Immigration, transportation, health, food safety. It is a billion dollar boondoggle of waste, designed to lull us into a false sense of security.
The problem with our homeland security is that we are becoming reactive. Bombs go off in London, so we have to add more police officers toting machine guns to the subways, and close the bathrooms. We have to add more metal detectors to confiscate nail clippers and knitting needles from airport travelers. Have to make sure we send Homeland Security dollars to protect Midwestern states from attack--and to make the congressmen look good to their constituents. Hey, if it works for the defense dollars, why not homeland security? Oh, but it looks so good to the American public. We're secure from attack.
We have to become pro-active in our security. We have to develop a common-sense approach to security with the idea of making it more efficient--both for our security and for the convenience of travelers. It is a balancing act of providing enough police in the trains and subways of the major cities, where terrorist strikes are more likely, but at an efficient level where travelers are not overburdened. We also have to provide an efficient emergency response, if a terrorist attack does happen.
But more importantly, we have to make sure that the terrorists do not strike the U.S. We have to develop a more robust intelligence service to find those terrorist groups. We have to get more agents into the Middle East to infiltrate the groups, get their names and understand their operations, then take them down. We have to coordinate with the intelligence agencies of Europe and Israel, pool and share information on these groups. And we have got to get out of Iraq! Iraq has become the terrorist training country in the world, and we made it so after our failed invasion. It is the beacon to recruit, train, and provide combat experience to new terrorists who can then go back to their own home countries to embark on more dangerous attacks.
Finally, we have to understand that no matter how scared we are at the possibility of another terrorist attack on the U.S. mainland, it is still very difficult for the al-Qaida terrorists to plan and execute a terrorist attack inside the U.S. It is still difficult to get into the U.S. and you must have the resources and cultural understanding of U.S. society in order to stay and execute your terrorist plans. I'm not saying it is not going to happen--it is still a possibility. But because the mainland U.S. is such a high profile target, requiring extensive knowledge and resources for an attack, al-Qaida may bypass U.S. mainland targets for other foreign targets providing greater terror benefits at a lesser cost. Thus we have the bombings in London, Madrid, and Bali. We may certainly have more terror attacks against Americans at tourist resorts. We are certainly going to see more attacks against American troops in Iraq, and possibly against American aid workers, or against American institutions throughout the world. Those are the soft targets. Those are the targets we should be concerned with.
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