New York Gets Lucky Again Three homegrown jihadists have struck the city in 14 months.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-gets-lucky-again-1513035572
For years after the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center towers, it was a point of civic pride among New Yorkers and their stellar police department that no serious terrorist attack had succeeded again in America’s foremost urban target. Now that may be changing, which raises questions about whether the post 9/11 status quo needs to be re-examined.
Monday morning’s failed pipe bombing by Bangladeshi Akayed Ullah at rush hour near the Port Authority bus terminal is the third attack in New York City by an Islamic terrorist in the past 14 months.
On Halloween day this year, Sayfullo Saipov, a New Jersey resident, drove a truck down a lower Manhattan bicycle path and killed eight people. A year before, Ahmad Khan Rahimi, also of New Jersey, detonated a pressure cooker filled with ball bearings on a street in the downtown Chelsea neighborhood. Rahimi planted two other bombs, one nearby in Chelsea and another in Seaside, N.J. No one died but he wounded 30.
The fact that no one died in two of these incidents is little solace. Make no mistake: On Monday New York City averted a major calamity.
In won’t do to dwell on the New York terrorists’ bomb-detonation ineptitude. That’s dumb luck. The driver who plowed through pedestrians in Nice on Bastille Day last year killed 86, and the United Kingdom’s Manchester Arena suicide bomber this May killed 23 and injured more than 500 people.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Monday morning, “This is one of my worst nightmares—a terrorist attack in the subway system.” That’s right, Governor, as it is constantly for all the millions of New Yorkers sitting in those subway cars every day.
After 9/11, two of the most significant terror-related incidents were political disputes about police surveillance. In 2007 Mitch Silber, then the NYPD’s top terrorism analyst, issued a detailed report, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat.” Mr. Silber and co-author Arvin Bhatt were prescient, but civil liberties groups denounced his report for its “stigmatizing effects” and supposed religious profiling.
Then in 2011 a series by the Associated Press described an NYPD program, the so-called “Demographics Unit,” which surveilled Muslim neighborhoods and mosques for information on where a terrorist might seek a job off the books or a cheap place to stay. Under the same pressure brought to bear on the Silber report, the department shut down this covert surveillance program in 2013.
Though bicycle-path killer Sayfullo Saipov attended the same mosque in Paterson, N.J. surveilled by the NYPD years before, the authorities conveyed to the public after the October attack that his mosque attendance was irrelevant. The NYPD’s current anti-terror specialists insist nothing material has altered their ability to collect information or data about potential attacks.
What a comfort it would be to be confident that this repeated reassurance is true. But the patience of New Yorkers—and of all Americans—is being pressed. After the bike-path attack, Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered more concrete barriers erected, a thumb-in-the-dike gesture that New Yorkers mocked as feckless.
What we know as fact is that homegrown terrorists who lived in Muslim neighborhoods have slipped through the city’s security apparatus three times in just over a year. With all respect to the city’s multiple political sensitivities, we suggest the time to have a debate about expanding surveillance is before a local terrorist kills many more innocent pedestrians or commuters, not the day after.
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