Protecting the homeland

A major new release from Ron Suskind, details in the New York Daily News:

WASHINGTON - Al Qaeda decided not to launch a deadly cyanide gas plot in New York's subways because it wouldn't have killed enough people, according to the author whose bombshell book revealed the frightening scheme.

"Al Qaeda's thinking is that a second-wave attack should be more destructive and more disruptive than 9/11," writer Ron Suskind said in an interview with Time magazine. "Why? Because that would create an upward arc of terror. ... That fear and terror is a central goal of the Al Qaeda strategy."

News of the 2003 plot to use homemade cyanide bombs, the details of which have been confirmed by the Daily News, was first revealed Friday in excerpts from Suskind's book "The One Percent Doctrine."

WE NEED TO DO MORE, AND WE NEED TO START YESTERDAY.

The Christian Science Monitor:

Nearly five years after 9/11, the United States remains far too vulnerable to natural disaster and major attack.

That's the consensus of security experts and a new federal report released Friday. Most states and local authorities lag in emergency planning, the report found. At the same time, the federal government is still struggling to close big security gaps in airline passenger screening and port security and at chemical plants, these experts say.

The reasons are many, they add, but a crucial one is American industry's limited security efforts. An estimated 85 percent of critical infrastructure is in private hands. But the Bush administration has largely resisted mandating the minimum security standards for business.