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Terror Inside The U.S. Why An al Qaeda Attack On U.S. Soil Is Still A Real Threat (Foreign Policy)
Najibullah Zazi, a lanky Afghan-American man in his mid-twenties, walked into the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, on July 25, 2009, in a visit that was captured on a store video camera. Wearing a baseball cap and pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of the store, Zazi appeared to be just another suburban guy, though not too many suburban guys buy six bottles of Clairoxide hair bleach, as Zazi did on this shopping trip. He then returned to the same store a month later where he purchased another dozen bottles of Ms. K Liquid, also a peroxide-based hair bleach. Aware that these were hardly the typical purchases of a heavily bearded, dark-haired young man, Zazi — who had lived in the States since the age of 14 — kibitzed easily with the counter staff joking that he had to buy such large quantities of hair products because he “had a lot of girl friends.”
In fact, Zazi, a sometime coffee-cart operator on Wall Street, was planning to launch what could have been the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11, using the seemingly innocuous hair bleach to assemble hydrogen peroxide-based bombs, a signature of al Qaeda plots in the past several years. During early September, 2009, at the Homewood Studio Suites in Aurora, Zazi mixed and cooked batches of the noxious chemicals in the kitchenette of his motel room. On the night of Sept. 6, as Zazi labored over the stove, he made a number of frantic calls to someone whom he asked for advice on how to perfect the bombs. Two days later, Zazi was on his way to New York in a rented car. By then, U.S. President Barack Obama was receiving daily briefings about Zazi, sometimes as many as three or four a day.
FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THIS LINK FOR FOREIGNPOLICY.COM: Peter Bergen discusses the risk of terror cases inside the U.S. | Foreign Policy.
