What We Learned from Times Square
Smart police tactics can halt terrorist attacks
It is not surprising that the right-wing media are
preoccupied with ideological clowning and cheap partisanship, even at a moment
when hundreds of Americans just barely escaped peril. This vapid entertainment
was captured perfectly in a FOX News video segment (which can be viewed on the
Media Matters for America
website). At the very moment FOX anchor Gretchen Carlson groused that
government officials "refuse to say the word 'terror,'" the
electronic scroll directly beneath her image reported that Homeland Security
Secretary Janet Napolitano had indeed referred to the car bomb as "a
potential terrorist attack."
Such semantic carping suggests that the right-wing
talking heads cannot find—or even invent—a serious complaint about the Times Square incident. Perhaps that is because the
response of government at all levels so far has been effective. The blocks
surrounding the bomb were swiftly evacuated, and the bomb squad quickly disarmed
the device. Then the suspected perp was apprehended within 48 hours, just as he
seemed to have been attempting escape on a flight to Dubai.
So whether government officials talk about
terrorism—or use it to frighten the public, as George W. Bush administration
officials so often did—seems to have little to do with whether they can
adequately protect us.
Intelligence-Led Policing
The real lessons from the latest attempted attack on
New York are
less political and more practical. The first line of defense is an alert
citizenry, a message that New Yorkers absorbed years ago. The next is a highly
trained police force that can respond instantly and effectively, while
constantly evaluating, anticipating and monitoring potential threats.
Under the leadership of Commissioner Raymond Kelly,
the New York City Police Department developed those capacities, in no small
part because he lacked confidence in the federal counterterrorism bureaucracy.
As Christopher Dickey reported in his excellent 2009 book Securing the City, Kelly created a special counterterrorism force
that ventured well beyond the traditional boundaries of urban policing. With
agents working in cities abroad, front companies and community surveillance,
the NYPD gathers copious intelligence that has thwarted numerous plots against
the city, including schemes to bomb synagogues and subway stations.
What is now known as "intelligence-led
policing" has become a model for the nation and the world.
Yet this time, the car bomb came close to completing
its murderous mission despite the vigilance of New York's
people and the skill and bravery of New
York's cops. The reason is quite simple: There is no
foolproof way to stop every single terrorist attack, even in countries that
permit far less freedom of movement and association than the United States.
Many of the worst attacks have been carried out in authoritarian countries,
such as Russia,
where the state security forces do not hesitate to use intrusive and brutal
methods.
Still, New
York's experience in protecting itself against an
enemy that conspires to kill its people every day is instructive. Rather than
stigmatize Muslims through profiling, as various numbskulls in Congress and on
TV would recommend, the city has cultivated relationships with the mainstream
Islamic community.
Among the critical lessons that Kelly learned from
Sept. 11 was the importance of language skills—so he and his deputies have
recruited scores of officers who speak useful dialects of Arabic and Pashto,
among others. Another key lesson was that the most likely terrorist recruits
were young men who had withdrawn from the local mosques, which don't promote
jihadism.
Unfortunately, learning from New York is scarcely on the minds of
right-wing pundits, some of who even seem disappointed when the terrorists
fail. But that kind of nihilistic rage is too often what passes for patriotism
in this country now.
2010 Creators.com
The administration prevented nothing in this case. The bomb didn't go off because the terrorist was incompetent. It is foolish to blame the administration for this near miss- but it is just as foolish to tout the administration's sharp and decisive action- the guy nearly got away. That second "near miss" was due entirely to a politically correct bureaucracy that didn't require timely updates to the no-fly list, and prevents profiling of 20-30 year-old men of middle-eastern descent, despite the fact that this description fits nearly all of the people who have committed acts of terrorism in the past 20 years. That's not Obama's fault, and not Bush's fault- but they're both responsible for the ineffective tangle of red tape binding law enforcement. And what about Contessa Brewer, who was disappointed that the terrorist was Muslim? Can we call that "Wishful Profiling?"
Wow - that was one of the most one-sided, hateful articles I have ever read.... Do you take pleasure in creating divisiveness in our country?
The World Socialist Website paints a far better picture of what's going on here. Faisal Shahzad sounds more like what many Americans are doing these days, but the faceless Shepard and mainstream news outlets have a blackout on it.
Nick Turse has written several articles correlating individual dramas (case by case) like arson, suicide and murder due to job losses, home foreclosures and the overarching capital crisis. Read: The Rising Body Count on Main Street The Human Fallout from the Financial Crisis and Meltdown Madness The Human Costs of the Economic Crisis.
A wider brush stroke in India's National Magazine Frontline: 'Matrix of Death' and Tom Burghardt's Blog: 'High-Tech Death from Above: U.S. Drone Wars Fuel War Crimes' reinforces my argument that this Shepard article is playing ignorant or is betraying it's readers with revolutionary sounding slogans and counter-revolutionary dis-or-mis-information like 88.9 FM does Milwaukee daily.
Then again, if you listened to Taking Aim regularly as I do, you wouldn't be so clueless. The Annihilation of Afghanistan is a very dark, twisted and sinister imperial project for the AFPAK 'theatre' Obama re-branded the 'Overseas-Contigency-Operation'. Whomever cheer leads, romanticizes, or fantasizes about these military adventures are deranged, delusional, mentally-disabled, psychopaths plain and simple. I know a lot of white right-wing 'christian' 'conservative' republicans think like Neanderthals, secretly love Nazi's and let their children consume military driven war games, but murder is not normal human behavior, even if it wears a uniform, which is why troops must be brainwashed into doing it.
If you want to get serious about looking at terrorism you need to look beyond David and take a look at Goliath's history. Counter-Insurgency, unconventional, low-intensity warfare IS terrorism folks and the U.S. has been developing it, refining it, using it, and exporting it for counter-revolutionary purposes around the world. COINS use Special Operation Forces answerable ONLY to the NSC. The NSC-68 memorandum spells it out.
The 2009 Merrill Lynch World Wealth report tells us 8.6 million people in a world of 6 billion have $32.8 trillion. 0.9%, 78,000 have $14 trillion and this wealth is migrating west-east into Shanghai expos. Silent about the exploitation of the global south, they'd like to 'help' these people recover $16 trillion since the economic meltdown.
The United States National Intelligence Council reported in 'Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World' what has been unfolding behind the blind Shepard.
The Shepard would like to put revolution on a catwalk to cheapen the word. Corporations are doing the same with PR and wrapping it around a name brand in some fancy packaging for American consumers. But these tricks will not fool people much longer and fail. I've been coming to the conclusion that the center-right Shepard and center-right 88.9 are what Noam Chomsky called the Mohawk Valley formula; used to coerce, contain, and mislead revolutionary movements.