It could happen here tomorrow

Only in New York City was security seen with any frequency. Here there were occasional sightings of security personnel, bomb sniffing dogs and technical gear for the screening of bags. Even here, though, such security measures were rare, probably too rare to have a significant deterrent effect on terrorists planning an attack

It does not take much of an imagination to see the enormity of the damage that a well-executed attack could cause. There were ten separate devices detonated, more or less simultaneously, in Madrid. Six different trains were hit. Think about what an attack like that would mean if carried out around 7 a.m. and centered on trains in the vicinity of Penn Station in New York City. The body count would be staggering. The economic cost would run to the billions.

How is this possible? How can we have created a new cabinet-level bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, with a budget of $50.5 billion, and still, eight years after 9/11 and six years after Madrid do nothing of consequence to defend ourselves? Are we really doomed to do nothing but put in place security measures against attacks that have already happened on our soil? In the entire massive homeland security and counterterrorism structure that we have created post 9/11, is there no one with the capacity to think a step ahead?

Let’s hope there is. And let’s hope they do something before we suffer the fate of Madrid, London, Mumbai and now Moscow.

Charles Faddis served 20 years in the Central Intelligence Agency as an operations officer, holding positions as a department chief at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in Washington, D.C., and as a chief of station in the Middle East. He is the author of the new book “Willful Neglect.”