Are they sleeping, or are we?

And I guess I just don't know.
Lou Reed, from The Velvet Underground and Nico

A sleeper cell, in intelligence jargon, is a subversive group that hangs around for a long time (years perhaps), its members behaving completely normally as far as anyone outside the group can see. But they are gathering resources and waiting till the order is given, or the opportunity arises, to strike.

Dave Gaubatz, a former "U.S. Federal agent" (a little vague there) who was assigned to Iraq for missions during the run-up to the invasion and is now a freelance counterterrorism specialist, says in an article on the American Thinker site that "there is every reason to suspect that we will endure suicide missions by Islamist sleeper cells. They are already in place. They are waiting for the right time. I know this from experience."

They may be "sleeping" for the moment, but so are we, he says.

Upon returning from Iraq I left Federal Service to pursue a career educating U.S. law enforcement in the U.S. … I began conducting research and talking with experts from various fields and determined three significant facts that I corroborated by further research:

1. The terrorists groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al-Qaeda each had different leaders and to some degree operated in different ways, but they each had the same two goals (destroy Israel and destroy America and any country that supported either).

2. Our nuclear research centers were very vulnerable to an attack and the potential for a suicide bomber using a dirty radiological bomb from these facilities was and is a high probability. Note: Vic Walter and Brian Ross of ABC News did an excellent report on the lack of security at these facilities. I received an enormous amount of information from individuals associated with Russian nuclear programs that there is nuclear material being sold on the black market and nuclear material is in the hands of Islamic Extremists.

3. Terrorist sleeper cells are located primarily in North Carolina, Michigan, and Canada. The "sleepers" are prepared to conduct terrorist attacks within the U.S., and nuclear material is available to them. "Prepared" in this instance indicates they have the necessary tools to carry our their attacks and are prepared to die.

I assure you, I have no inside information of any kind. My guess is that in the five years since 9/11, numerous sleeper cells have been operating quietly, taking advantage of our wide-open borders, our unwillingness to impose any limits on Muslim immigration, and a deep yearning by the American people to forget all this security stuff get back to our national business of selling and buying (we no longer make anything, of course, plenty of $2-a-day wretches in the world's backward countries — excuse me, I mean developing nations — to do that for us).

When the balloon goes up, the next target(s) probably won't be anything spectacular like nuclear power plants or airliners. Why go to the trouble when there are so many soft targets — shopping malls, schools, bridges, office buildings?

If Gaubatz is to be believed (read his article), law enforcement officials aren't very interested in evidence of sleeper cells. Of course, you can't take his word as gospel. He is in the lecture and training business, and predicting terrorist-induced disaster is one way to gain attention (like this posting). And maybe the law enforcement agencies he said ignored the information did no such thing, and just didn't feel like sharing the details of their counterterrorist activities with Gaubatz, who is now a private citizen. If they have agents inside these cells, they're not going to broadcast the information. They'd want the cell members to believe that the FBI is just a clutch of paper-shuffling, form-filling mopes.

Personally, I think American counterterrorism forces are smarter and more activist than they seem. I hope, anyway. And I guess I just don't know.