“People who are angry at us will be more so,” said Matthew Levitt, a counterterrorism and intelligence expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. “They had attacks in the works last week, last month, today — and those things can still happen.”
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base increased security precautions, and motorists were warned to expect delays accessing base gates because of additional screening.
“While increased vigilance is prudent, force protection changes do not automatically mean any specific threat has been identified,” said Derek Kaufman, a spokesman for the base.
Law enforcement officials said Monday that they are seeing no specific, bin Laden-related threats at this point, but they issued a bulletin warning that homegrown extremists could use this as an excuse to launch an attack.
Offsetting that, experts said, are the reverberations of the successful U.S. operation.