Will an Atomic ISIS Finally Get Obama Off the Dance Floor?
by DEROY MURDOCK April 4, 2016
Obama similarly debased himself and humiliated his country via a tango in Buenos Aires, a baseball game with Cuban despot Raul Castro in Havana (including Obama doing the wave), and an Easter-eve round of golf. All this transpired barely hours after radical Islamic terrorists turned Brussels into a slaughterhouse. Just before Obama partied, ISIS killers wounded 316 and murdered 32 innocents, including four Americans, in a NATO-allied capital.
What, if anything, will make Obama abandon his Ringling Bros.-quality clown routine, display a modicum of maturity, and - at long last - get serious about obliterating jihad in general and ISIS in particular?
Perhaps once ISIS goes radioactive, it finally will dawn on Obama that Islamic terrorism is no laughing matter.
"Recent weeks have brought growing evidence that ISIS is actively seeking weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear material," Karl Vick wrote in a bone-chilling dispatch
in Timemagazine's April 4 edition. "The evidence is piecemeal but alarming to counterterrorism experts who've watched ISIS grow increasingly aggressive."
Aggressive, indeed.
- Someone fatally shot Didier Prospero four times inside his home just outside Brussels, only two days after the terror onslaught. His job as a guard at a nuclear medical-research outfit raised eyebrows, as did disputed reports that his access pass was stolen.
- Workers at Belgium's atomic-energy plants at Doel and Tihange were sent home after the Brussels attacks, reportedly for fear that one or more insiders might try something ugly. Eleven such employees at Tihange had their badges stripped in recent weeks, four since the Brussels mayhem.
- Belgian officials believe that suicide bombers Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui recorded ten hours of surveillance video of a high-level Belgian nuclear scientist after hiding a camera in the bushes across from his home.
- Someone obscured a surveillance camera at the Doel nuclear-power station in 2014, then drained 17,200 gallons of turbine lubricant, nearly causing a reactor to overheat.
- Beyond sabotaging an atomic-energy plant from inside, terrorists most likely would aim less for building a Hiroshima-style A-bomb, and more for crafting a radioactive-material-filled dirty bomb. While such a weapon's conventional explosion might kill only dozens, it would irradiate thousands, panic millions, create billions in economic losses, and yield infinite global anxiety.
Such a radiological device "could render a square mile of central New York City uninhabitable for decades," Time's Karl Vick explains, "handing the terrorists a lasting symbolic victory, one with devastating financial impacts."
Preventing such a dark day will require far greater vigilance by hospitals, food-irradiation facilities, and other institutions that use medical and industrial isotopes. The same radioactive elements that shrink tumors in small amounts could wreak total havoc if packed into pipe bombs. Those materials these days seem as secure as tongue depressors.
The Government Accountability Office inspected 25 hospitals in Washington, D.C., and seven states several years ago. One medical center kept its radioactive substances in a room with "a combination lock on the door," GAO's Gene Aloise told a Senate hearing in March 2012, "but the combination to the lock was written in pencil on the door frame for everyone to see." Elsewhere, Aloise testified, the facility's administrator "did not know the exact number of individuals with unescorted access to the hospital's radiological sources, although he said that there were at least 500 people."
Such open hatches obviously need to be welded shut. But more importantly, those who would try to slip through them need to be neutralized at home and liquidated overseas.
If only Obama were up to the task.
With more than nine months of Obama's terminal malpractice to go, one hopes that the defining visual of this dismal presidency does not become Obama gettin' down while Geiger counters go haywire in midtown Manhattan.
A version of this piece previously appeared on National Review Online.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment