According to Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, head of the military’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, some of the same terrorists who amassed the know-how on building IEDs are setting their sites on the U.S.
“Today’s IEDs are relatively simple, low-tech devices, which routinely use command wire, pressure plates, or radio-controlled triggers,” Barbero wrote in written testimony released Thursday ahead of a closed hearing of a subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee. “Many readily available components such as cellphones, agricultural fertilizers and simple electronic transmitters and receivers have legitimate commercial uses, but are easily and increasingly adapted for illicit purposes in manufacturing IEDs.”
Barbero cited the case of an Iraqi named Waad Ramadan Alwan who moved to Kentucky in 2009 after winning a visa as a political refugee. According to a December 16, 2011, plea agreement, Alwan was an Iraqi insurgent working between 2003 and 2006 to plant IEDs on roads traveled by U.S. troops. In 2010, in Bowling Green, Ken., Alwan began to train another man in how to make them, making diagrams of the bombs and giving oral instructions on how to assemble the devices, according to the document.
In his testimony, Barbero said the military provided key intelligence to the FBI in the Alwan case. He said their cooperation was an example of weapons technical intelligence, a process of identifying the markings of signatures of explosives and matching with other kinds of data, working to neutralize a threat.
