Agroterrorists and Al Qaeda target US agriculture

Were the terrorists who torched 14 tractor-trailer rigs at Harris Farms in California’s Central Valley unaware that the drivers of those vehicles sometimes slept overnight in those rigs? Or was surveillance by those terrorists so pronounced that they knew nobody was in those rigs in the early morning hours as they set fire to them on Jan 8, 2012. Either scenario is chilling to Tom Knowles, a retired agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a terrorism authority with the Sacramento Regional Terrorism Threat Assessment Center. Knowles was among three speakers at an ag crimes and terrorism summit who warned that the central San Joaquin Valley, boasting billions of dollars in agricultural production, can be vulnerable to attack from terrorists from abroad or homegrown. Knowles, who is with the Sacramento Regional Terrorism Threat Assessment Center, said agriculture is particularly vulnerable to attack because “you don’t have to touch it to cause problems.” It can be enough to simply feed into a perception that food is contaminated. Knowles said that U.S. forces have found documents at an Al Qaeda training camp that showed interest in targeting farms in the United States, purposely contaminating food supplies by spreading contaminants that include foot and mouth diseases and hog cholera. In 1986, a group calling itself the “Breeders” said it had released Mediterranean fruit flies in Southern California to protest aerial spraying of the pesticide malathion, said Carl Hafner, Fresno County agriculture commissioner. They also threatened to release the flies in the San Joaquin Valley, but apparently did not do so. Hafner said there was evidence that the claim was not a hoax, including the discovery of unexpected life stages of the insect. The case remains unsolved...more