Steven Emerson on Mumbai Train Attacks & NYC Tunnel Plot

By Andrew Cochran

Steven Emerson appeared on NBC Nightly News and on CNN on July 11 to discuss the Mumbai train attacks and the NYC subway plot (with Peter Bergen and Harold Wiseman) and warned that a terrorist rail attack on US soil "is impossible to protect against" and that You can see video of his NBC appearance and his CNN appearance (both Windows Media), and here are the transcripts:

Brian Williams: For more on the threat of terror attacks on transit systems here and around the world, we turn now to Steve Emerson, an expert in counterterrorism and an analyst for us here at NBC news. Steve, why this apparent concentration on the part of the terrorists on this mode of transportation?

Steve Emerson: The train system, Brian, is the softest of all soft targets. It's impossible to protect against. They are moving targets, and they provide a wonderful opportunity for terrorists to inflict mass casualties and most importantly they want to disrupt the economy and they've done so.

Williams: Isn't there another prevalent location here? This one is more geographic, and that is their tendency to look for financial districts, wherever they strike?

Emerson: There's no doubt about that. 9/11 was clearly aimed at disrupting the U.S. economy and the attacks in Mumbai today clearly showed what terrorists can do in the United States. In Washington, in New York or Chicago, it would cripple the economy and cause mass hysteria. It is a very difficult problem that is impossible to protect against.

Paula Zahn Now on CNN

PAULA ZAHN: If the FBI is right about this guy’s plans to cross into theUS from Canada, it raises more concern than ever about security along our northern border. Our top story coverage continues with a panel of security specialists Harold Wiseman with the Institute of Public Affairs In Montreal, CNN Terrorism analyst Peter Bergen, and Steve Emerson, the author of American Jihad: the Terrorist Living Among Us. Welcome, glad to have all three of you as part of our team tonight. Steve I’m going to get started with you. We just heard that piece that preceded this, how much this guy defied the typical profile of a Jihad terrorist, so how much further does the blow apart the assumptions that the intelligence community has to make about who terrorists are?

STEVE EMERSON: Well, it certainly, as you pointed out, defies the stereotype, but it’s still the basic outline of who terrorists mingle with, and how they operate still revolves around a religious type of behavior that they can certainly critique and has a commonality with other terrorists. He clearly did not show that behavior, but he is the exception to the rule, Paula.

ZAHN: And Peter, how do you reconcile being a Jihadist member and living the way this guy lived. The lifestyle of a playboy with women in a bunch of different cities, a lot of drinking, a lot of carousing.

PETER BERGEN: Well we have seen this story before, one of the lead hijackers in 9/11, Zihad Jarro, was an upper middle class Lebanese who had a girlfriend, and he was drinking, he was socializing with Americans when he was in this country, before he piloted one of the plans on 9/11. Also one of the operational commanders of 9/11, a guy by the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was carousing in the Philippines , had sort of a Philipino girlfriend and so while it is unusual it certainly isn’t something that hasn’t happened, actually we have seen this occasionally before. This kind of thing, maybe sometimes it’s a cover, but maybe sometimes people just want to have it both ways, to enjoy these things at the same time they are plotting these terrorist attacks.

ZAHN: Bill, we recently learned that Hammoud actually went to college in Canada so how concerned should Americans watching this show tonight be about what an easy entry point it seems that Canada is for Al-Qaeda.

HAROLD WISEMAN: You’ve hit the major point. Americans have to be less concerned today under the Harper Administration because they are addressing three important points. Immigration is lax, horribly lax, and that bothers the vast majority of Muslims in Canada who are law abiding and contributing to this country. We take in 300,000 immigrants and refugees a year, three times that of Australia . And we have a three-year backlog before their cases are heard. This government is addressing the problem. They ' re also addressing two other problems: the lack of field intelligence. Seasoned agents don ' t have enough people on the ground to gather intelligence. With what they ' ve done, they ' ve done well and stopped a lot of other plots and aborted a lot of operations. The third issue that ' s going to be addressed by this administration that was failed to be addressed for ten years is our port situation. Much attention is always given in the United States and in Canada to airports and subways, and yet none is given to ports where only 1 in 100 cargo containers are checked. Since the federal government in Canada stopped funding port police that ' s not going to get better any time soon.

ZAHN: None of that reassuring as we wait for those changes to have impact. Steve, we saw the FBI make those arrests in Miami in conjunction with a plot apparently to bomb the Sears Tower . Now we see the arrest of this man in conjunction with his co-conspirators. But there doesn ' t seem to be any proof that they were actually ready to carry out this attack. Do you think the feds jumped the gun here?

EMERSON: No. I think they couldn' t afford to wait to take action. If they tried to play it out, they would be playing with people's lives. Look, before 9/11, if people thought 4 terrorist commanders with 15 supporters could take over airplanes and plow into buildings and take them down, people would have thought they were crazy. I think you have to take them down, arrest them before the conspiracy actually materializes.

WISEMAN: This point of Steve’s is very, very important because as all of you have heard, there were the arrests of 17 young men in Toronto and there was a great debate whether they were really plotting, whether they weren 't. Well, they were. And Canadian security authorities for 14 months worked with their family. They went to them to tell them what they were doing. The families and the communities had no influence and they had to arrest them before they did anything.

ZAHN: Peter, you get the final word. Ten seconds left about what the deal is with al Qaeda and trains.

BERGEN: They tend to attack the same kinds of targets. They tend to go back to things that have worked in the past.

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