"A more aggressive form of terrorism"
by digby
Leon Panetta just said on Fareed Zakaria that we should all run for our lives because the terrorists are coming. Well, not exactly. He said that while it's true that we have raised our intelligence capabilities since 9/11 and unlike in Europe, Muslims in America are able to assimilate, we're still in grave danger:
Foreign nationals are still allowed to come back into our country and there are thousands of these nationals that are overseas in Syria and Iraq and yemen. I think it still represents a serious danger to the United States. I don't think we can take anything for granted. I think we are dealing with a much more aggressive form of terrorism coming at us from different directions and the United States ought to continue to remain very vigilant in going after this kind of terrorism.
Shooting up an office building is more aggressive that flying planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Really? That's ridiculous and yet I hear all these intelligence people saying this.
The whole discussion is around certain lone wolves or sleeper cells finding their way into the country to launch attacks like Charlie Hebdo. I agree that would be awful. All such violence is awful. And lord knows we don't need any more mass shootings in America. We have plenty already.
Yes, I know the intention is different than our homegrown massacres, but so what? Nobody in their right minds can believe that such acts will result in Muslim extremists taking over the country. It's a violent political act designed to frighten a people into making bad decisions, whether it's a misguided war or accepting authoritarianism or perpetrating immoral acts like torture which they can use to recruit more extremists. They cannot destroy us so they do these things to provoke us into destroying ourselves. It's a cliche but it happens to be true. If we don't panic they don't get what they want.
I brought this up the other day but it's worth repeating. We have had a more recent attack than 9/11 which resembles the Charlie Hebdo massacre: the Boston Bombing. It was perpetrated by a couple of misfit Muslim extremist brothers who had been radicalized by who knows what and they decided to launch an attack on civilians. In some ways it was even more horrible that Charlie Hebdo because it targeted an apolitical event. But despite some overreach by the authorities in shutting down the whole city for a short period, in the main we kept our wits about us and did not immediately start talking about giving the government more power or cracking down on Muslim populations. Indeed, we were remarkably mature about the whole thing. Today the surviving bomber is on trial in Boston.
But this attack in Europe seems to have gotten everyone's juices flowing again and we have Panetta et al on TV blathering on about a "unique" threat even though it's not unique at all and we deal with nuts shooting up the place all the time. I guess we're just ready to get our blood up again...