VCU prof: ‘We have to be vigilant’ in wake of Bin Laden death

The news of the death of Osama Bin Laden has “reinvigorated the great spirit of this great country,” said William H. Parrish, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who served in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration.

“But that day is now behind us, and now we have to realize that our focus cannot change,’ Parrish said.

Which is to say, no, the threat from radical terrorists didn’t sink to the bottom of the sea with Bin Laden’s own personal demise. “We have to be vigilant, because there are going to be attempts at retaliation. And it would be an unwise person who would think that these would not succeed,” Parrish said.

The risk near term, to Parrish, is from “lone-wolf operations, individuals sitting on the fence plotting to do something, but never really having enough intestinal fortitude to actually do it.” Bin Laden’s death could push them off the fence, Parrish said.

“Those lone wolfs are very, very hard to identify,” Parrish said. But, looking at the stories of lone-wolf shooters like Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman responsible for the mass shooting in Tucson in January that targeted Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford, and Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 in the mass shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech in 2007, there are lessons to draw from that can help those looking for the needle in the haystack.

“If you recall those incidents, there were people who had identified those individuals as being prepared to do something. And in those cases, people didn’t do anything about them,” Parrish said.

Mid-term, there is potentially heightened risk from three- and four-man cells who have been planning and plotting actions without a specific timeline. “These individuals who have been thinking about it may want to accelerate their planning process,” Parrish said.

Long-term, the focus needs to be on the Al Qaeda franchisees who have direct or indirect ties to Al Qaeda and have adopted the strategies and approaches traced back to Bin Laden.

One key paradigm related to terrorism hasn’t changed. “Bankers think in terms of quarters. Politicians think in terms of election years. Terrorists think in terms of decades,” Parrish said.