The FlyDubai attempted hijacking shows the U.S. and its allies are still using outdated counterterrorism assumptions against increasingly sophisticated enemies, a U.S. rescue expert and 9/11 first responder warns.
“Theyre good at chess,” Bryan Stern, chairman and CEO of Grey Bull Rescue, told Fox News Digital on Monday, saying the radical ideology behind the FlyDubai attack is a ringing “bell” for global aviation security and Western counterterrorism strategy.
“And were, if were lucky, playing checkers â if were lucky â and I would argue were not even playing checkers that well.”
Stern, whose global nonprofit conducts evacuations from war zones and hostage situations, said the thwarted FlyDubai attack by “an angry, radicalized, Sunni bad guy” is showing just how far behind our enemies we are in this post-9/11 world.
“They understand us significantly more than we understand them,” Stern, who has been “hunting the bad guys” for 30 years, said. Stern said the U.S. has to understand the “asymmetric warfare” as well as the increasingly sophisticated enemy does.
“The reason why a football coach watches game tapes is not to watch his own team play, it’s to watch the bad guys play,” he said. “We gotta start watching some game tapes.”
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Stern is intimately in tune with the playbook on the ground in war zones, including the Middle East and Iran.
“We conduct these operations in these places still to this very day,” he said. “We’re actually on the ground, meaning I know people in Hezbollah, I know people in the Taliban. I know people in ISIS. I know people in ISIS-K. I’ve met with radical jihadi weirdos and whack jobs personally.”
United Arab Emirates investigators have described the incident aboard FlyDubai flight FZ1073 as an attempted terror attack after the co-pilot allegedly stabbed the captain and tried to hijack the plane, which was carrying more than 170 passengers and crew, most of them Israelis. Australian authorities have also said a counterterrorism unit is investigating the co-pilots links to Australia.
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“The bad guys are completely not afraid. They’re completely emboldened. They have got the whole world to hate Israel, the whole world to hate us,” he said. “It’s a tough problem.”
Since the incident, there has been renewed vigilance in aviation and foreign airline security. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed his national security council to review security procedures for foreign civil aviation to Israel, while Vice President JD Vance said Monday that flight security procedures are also under review in the U.S.
“I was asked years ago when I was still with the government,” Stern said. “A team was put together and the question before the court was, if you were al-Qaeda, what would
