CHICAGO — While the Department of Homeland Security is throwing millions of dollars at prevention tactics for nuclear and bioterrorism threats, the department has saved a little to spend on diffusing potential weapons that could be manufactured from cleaning and construction materials purchased at your local Lowe’s, Home Depot or Sally Beauty Supply.
The Bomb-Making Materials Awareness Program, or BMAP, is one of the newest in the DHS’s arsenal of terrorism-prevention efforts. Though the measure was introduced at a National Retail Federation Loss Prevention Conference in Orlando, Fla., in June 2008, the program is slowly getting off the ground at police departments across the nation.
One state showing recent BMAP activity is North Carolina. Because of its numerous military ports, North Carolina has become a hot bed for terrorism-diffusing training. Last month, Homeland Security’s Office of Bombing Prevention set up a BMAP session at the State Fairgrounds in Raleigh, training 75 law-enforcement offers in the region. Another session will be held later in the month at Fort Bragg.
“North Carolina is a forward-leaning, proactive state,” says John Yarboro, a Homeland Security branch chief in Raleigh, who helped coordinate the event. “This is not Mayberry. We have a huge military footprint in addition to a robust economy.”
At the full-day session, intelligence officers trained law-enforcers how to teach workers in the private sector to spot potential bomb-makers. Workers are to notify local police who will then notify Homeland Security.
The end goal is not simply to diffuse a bomb, but to quash all efforts to make an improvised explosive device in its tracks. And to catch the would-be terrorist.
“Improvised explosive device attacks remain the primary tactic for terrorists seeking relatively uncomplicated, inexpensive means for inflicting mass casualties and maximum damage” a presentation slide from the 2008 National Retail Federation conference states.
According to the OBP, peroxides were used in the London rail bombings in 2005, the trans-Atlantic airline plot in 2006 and the shoe-bombing plot in 2001; ammonium nitrate was used in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. These materials can be found and purchased at retail stores nationwide.
Because improvised explosive devices are so easy to make, Yarboro says, it’s important to identify why a person might be buying massive amounts of peroxide late at night. Are they really bleaching hair?
He says BMAP does not single out foreigners but concentrates on all sorts of potential terrorists, including Americans.
“There are people in this country who want to do us harm,” he said. “It’s not just about Al Qaeda, bin Laden or Yemen. Anyone with any basic knowledge [of homemade explosives] can put one of their things together and make it go bang.”
The effectiveness of BMAP, as with most of DHS’s terrorism-prevention programs, remains to be seen. Trent Walker, a critical incident planner at the Greensboro Police Department, in Greensboro, N.C., says overall awareness since September 11 has been heightened in North Carolina and that police officers are receiving far more intelligence and terrorism-prevention training than ever before.
For the past five years, Walker, who has been with the GPD since 1992, has coordinated the department’s bomb team. Recently, he and his bomb team have been reaching out to businesses, telling them how to recognize people coming in to buy precursor materials for improvised explosives.
“It’s hard to try to get folks to take on the responsibility to doing this,” Walker says. “A lot of times employees are there to sell materials and they don’t think about it like a law-enforcement officer would.”
But, Walker said, police efforts to train businesses have not been in vein.
“There’s a chemical company that sells extremely hazardous substances in Greensboro,” he says. “Someone was taking photos [outside the facility] and police came out. They found out the citizen was with some type of group concerned about what chemicals in the facility.”
Though this incident was not terrorism-related, Walker said this sort of activity is the type security guards and cashiers need to look out for. They’re to notify the police, and the information goes to intelligence.
“What happens to that information, I don’t know,” Walker said.
