CIAO DATE: 11/2009
September 2009
Given that Los Angeles is the nation’s second largest city; the largest city in California, a state that would rank among the world’s tenth largest economies if it were a country1; a global melting pot teeming with a rich stew of races and ethnicities speaking a wide variety of languages and dialects; a trendsetter as to popular attitudes and social mores; and the capital of America’s iconic film and television industry, it stands to reason that it ranks at or near the very top of the terror target list. This is not a matter of simple logic or mere conjecture. At least two of the 9/11 hijackers spent time in Los Angeles in the months leading up to the attacks2. The so-called “Millennium Bomber,” Ahmed Ressam, was arrested at the Canadian border on New Year’s Eve, 1999 with the intent to bomb Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). On the Fourth of July in 2002, an Egyptian limousine driver, Hesham Muhammad Ali Hadayet, shot two people to death at the El Al Israeli airline ticket counter at LAX and wounded three before being killed himself by airline security guards3. According to then President Bush, American counterterrorism officials foiled a plot that same year (2002) to bomb Los Angeles’ Liberty Tower, the tallest building west of the Mississippi. In 2005, an arrest in a string of seemingly prosaic gas station robberies in the suburb of Torrance led detectives to an Al Qaeda-inspired terror plot targeting U.S. Army recruiting centers and synagogues.
Resource link: Los Angeles' Preparedness for Terrorism [PDF] - 390K