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Red Cell Think Tank
Posted by Lance Bandley on July 20, 2005 at 06:03 PM | Permalink
I had an interesting conversation today with an author out of Park City. Brad Thor writes military thrillers and after 9/11 he was invited by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to join the "Analytic Red Cell Program." Thor says it's a turbo charged think tank where people are brought in from intelligence, military, law enforcement and the private sector to come up with potential terrorist scenarios. Thor says one day he just received a call on his cell phone asking him to be a part of the group. He's one of two thriller writers the group brought in to come up with ideas.
Thor is now able to talk about his work with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While he can't give specific details on some things he says they talked about: prospects for new terror incidents in the United States, potential vulnerabilities, effectiveness of U.S. countermeasures, and implications of overseas terror incidents. While his background isn't in the military his father was a marine and he has many contacts with the intelligence community which helped him come up with a lot of the ideas for his books.
His latest book "BLOWBACK" is about a weapon designed to decimate the Roman Empire that is now a threat to the United States. Thor says it's based on research about a current group of Islamic Fundamentalist scientists that are aligned with Al-Qaida who are searching all over the world looking to get their hands on anything to be used against the West.
Thor says he writes his novels by day and when his phone rings he flies out to Washington D-C to help brain storm on incidents including the latest attack in London.
Comments
I don't think Al-Qaida and other Islamic fundamentalists need to try so hard to destroy the U.S. We will likely continue to sue one another over things no one can control (see http://tv.ksl.com/index.php?sid=220134&nid=5 for the latest example) until we bleed ourselves (our government, our schools, businesses, each other) dry.
Posted by: DR | Jul 20, 2005 8:05:45 PM
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