Terrorism: The lessons of Times Square

The truth is, we got lucky, said Joe Conason in The New York Observer. We’ve learned a lot about domestic terrorism from the recent failed Times Square bombing, including that we can’t always depend on “the federal counterterrorism bureaucracy” to prevent attacks. A vendor noticed a smoking SUV left parked on the street, and New York City’s superb police force quickly determined that it was packed with explosives and cleared Times Square. Nonetheless, if accused terrorist Faisal Shahzad had not failed to build an effective bomb, he would have killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people in the heart of Manhattan on May 1. What Shahzad proved, once again, is that “there is no foolproof way to stop every single terrorist attack.” Even in authoritarian police states like Russia, determined terrorists sometimes slip through the cracks. Shahzad certainly did, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. After the bomb failed to explode, he somehow managed to elude FBI agents on his tail, and he boarded a plane to Dubai even though he’d been placed on the no-fly list. But the bottom line is the bomb didn’t go off, and Shahzad was caught before the plane took off. “The system worked.”

No, it didn’t—and the White House knows it, said Ralph Peters in the New York Post. That’s why the Obama administration quickly went from dismissing the Times Square plot as a “one-off” planned by a “lone wolf” to this week announcing that the attack was an act of “international terrorism” sponsored by Pakistan’s Taliban. In an “abrupt about-face,” Attorney General Eric Holder called on Congress to broaden the “public-safety exception” to the Miranda warning, so that interrogators do not have to advise suspects of their right to remain silent and consult with a lawyer. For months, Holder has been insisting that accused terrorists should be treated like any other criminal. Why the aggressive new stance? Clearly, a deeply shaken White House has been informed that additional attacks are in the planning stages and may come soon. “The folks at the top are worried about the political cost of a successful terrorist strike.”

The deeper problem, said Mark Steyn in National Review Online, is that Obama remains in denial about the true nature of the threat. The terrorists out to kill Americans in large numbers have one thing in common: They’re Islamic fanatics. Like Shahzad and the underwear bomber, most are young, educated, and Westernized. Until we get serious about “curtailing Muslim immigration” or at least subjecting immigrants from Islamist hotbeds to more scrutiny, we’ll just have to hope that “stupid jihadists screw up every time.”

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Unfortunately, they won’t, said Richard Clarke in The Washington Post. Sooner or later, some fanatic will succeed in blowing up a building, shooting up a mall, or bringing down a plane. So the question is: How do we respond when that happens? Without a doubt, “political opportunists” will cynically seize on any successful act of terrorism to insist that prevailing counterterrorism efforts are “feckless,” and that the U.S. should return to warrantless wiretapping, waterboarding, and jailing people without charges or trials. Some will call for new invasions of Iran or Pakistan. But as we learned after 9/11, there is no magic bullet for eliminating the terrorist threat; it “will take a generation of diligent effort.” In the meantime, beware of demagogues who “seek political gain from the murder of Americans.”