How Safe Are Our Football Stadiums?

Friday, October 20, 2006

By John Scott, Fox News Live

October 19, 2006

Transcript

John Scott: There’s nothing like packing up a family on a fall weekend and heading to the footballs stadium to cheer on your team. But some folks might think twice about that after hearing of an internet threat that claims dirty bombs are going to be exploded at seven stadiums this weekend. Former 9/11 commissioner and Indiana Congressman Tim Roemer joins us now to talk about that. Congressman Roemer, should people stay home?

Tim Roemer: Hey John, no they shouldn’t. I’m actually taking my family, my kids to a football game, not this weekend but next weekend. I think there should be two things to be learned from this, John. First of all the threat: We reacted, I think, in the Homeland Security Department pretty quickly to the threat. It was on an open website, it was about maybe al-Qaeda getting radioactive weapons and taking those in trucks to seven home football games. The FBI found that there was not actionable intelligence to back this up. They don’t think it’s a creatable threat.

Secondly, moving from the pigskin to the pork barrel, it does teach us some lessons, however. What are we doing if al-Qaeda wants radiological weapons? We need to be better protected. The 9/11 Commission made a host of recommendations which we still haven’t seen Congress and the White House act on, and on pork barrel spending John, something which I know Fox viewers are considerate about. We still haven’t put a national strategy so that we’re measuring with metrics how we are doing with our nuclear power plants, on our chemical plants, on our refineries. And prioritizing things rather than just letting pork barrel projects and pet projects determine how we spend out precious tax-payers’ money.

Scott: A couple of things here: we know that al-Qaeda would love to damage the US economy, I mean that’s part of the reason they went after the World Trade Center on 9/11. But we also know that they don’t typically their telegraph attacks in advance, right?

Roemer: Well, what we do know is that al-Qaeda loves the spectacular. They love to do something like 9/11: many buildings and make it a spectacular type setting. Sometimes they do like to telegraph what they might be doing. Remember, prior to 9/11 John, they killed Ahmed Shah Masood over in the Afghanistan/Northern Alliance area and took him out and then went after us on 9/11. So sometimes they will typically try to telegraph. And also as we have seen they hit soft targets in Madrid, they hit them again in London with the railway suicide bombings there. They do tend to go in certain phases and they do sometimes like to target and brag about it.

Scott: This website, 'The Friend Society' that first issued this threat, is that something that you have come across in you study of Homeland Security?

Roemer: New one to me! There is certainly a host of different al-Qaeda websites out there. That they sometime will post these kinds of warnings. For instance, if Osama bin Laden or al-Zawahiri is going to do a tape, sometimes you can go to certain websites and know that this tapes is coming a few days ahead of time. So, there are some sites you can go to to see what al-Qaeda is up to, or what they’re going to warn about or brag about. This is a brand new one I’m not familiar with and nor do I think our intelligence services were familiar with.

Scott: Congressman Roemer, enjoy the game next weekend.

Roemer: Thanks John.

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