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Terror TV Tonight: 'Mission Ops: Assignment IEDs'

By James Gordon Meek

It's Friday afternoon at the Garden. The Knicks are playing to a full house, while directly below, Penn Station is pushing a quarter million commuters out on trains. And then the unthinkable happens -- a series of massive, simultaneous blasts turns several crowded trains into crematoriums, just like Madrid three years ago. This is the horrific scenario top counterterrorism officials dread because hundreds might die if Iraq-style improvised explosive devices were sprinkled around the block.

Top terrorism analyst and author Peter Bergen (The Osama Bin Laden I Know) hosts a chilling new documentary airing tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern on the Discovery Times channel about how terrorists construct and use deadly IEDs. The Penn Station scenario is one of the potential catastrophes officials fear could befall New York City in the coming years, and it forms the backdrop of Bergen's excellent one-hour show, "Mission Ops: Assignment IEDs." A story about the TV program ran in Sunday's New York Daily News.

Bergen, who was the first western journalist to interview Osama Bin Laden in 1997, doesn't have the reputation of being an alarmist "chicken little." Quite the opposite. But he warns that Iraq is producing angry bomb-making experts, who will eventually bring their chaos here -- regardless of whether the U.S. stays or withdraws from the war.

Many officials keeping track of threats against the U.S. agree with Bergen's cold assessment. "How are you going to stop it?" wondered a senior FBI counterterrorism official I spoke to last week.

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Surprised? Experts studying the use of IEDs that have wreaked havoc among U.S. troops in Iraq warn that the deadly bombs will likely be exploding here sometime in the near future...There are going to be a bunch of pissed-off Iraqis [Read More]