The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency worries that the next terror attack against the U.S. might involve the kind of deadly suicide bombings of malls, restaurants, or theaters that have been widespread in Israel. DARPA has been collaborating with Israel to use that country’s video databases of suicide bombers approaching targets to develop biometric face and gait recognition software, sensors, radar, and other technologies to detect and deter suicide bombers, says U.S. News & World Report.
Since last fall, the U.S. government has made it a top priority to understand what factors triggered the “self-radicalization,” especially among second- and third-generation Muslim youth in England, Spain, the Netherlands, and Canada, involved in suicide bombings. In a new nonpartisan survey of more than 100 top foreign-policy experts, two-thirds say that the most likely form of attack on American soil is a suicide bombing–far more likely, they said, than a chemical or biological attack, an attack on a nuclear power plant, or a so-called dirty (radiological) bomb. “It’s coming. You know it’s coming,” says James Cavanaugh, a senior Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives official who just returned from Israel. “Al Qaeda has made suicide terrorism the binding force of the jihad movement.”
Link: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060703/3bombs.htm