Townhall...
Who
Really Kept Us Safe After 9/11
By Steve Chapman
9/8/2011
If
there was any certainty in the
weeks and months after the 9/11 attacks, it was that these were just
the first
in a campaign of terror on American soil. “You can just about bet on
it,” said
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., the ranking Republican on the Intelligence
Committee. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, “I anticipate another
attack.”
Gary
Stubblefield, who directed the
Naval Special Warfare Task Unit in the Pacific area, asserted that, as
The
Denver Post paraphrased, “the question is not if but when dozens of
terrorist
cells in the United States will unleash biological, chemical and
perhaps
nuclear weapons against U.S. cities.” FBI Director Robert Mueller
estimated the
U.S. harbored “several hundred” extremists affiliated with al-Qaida.
Americans
had seen in Israel how a
homegrown terrorist movement was able to kill hundreds of people with
suicide
bombings and other attacks. It seemed we could expect the same. A
comment often
heard was, “We are all Israelis now.”
But
the predictions have not come
true. There have been very few attacks in this country by Islamic
extremists --
and nothing remotely on the scale of 9/11. The “sleeper cells” proved
to be mostly
nonexistent.
This
surprising record has been
attributed to excellent work by the FBI, CIA and other law enforcement
agencies, the war in Afghanistan, and the Bush administration’s
aggressive
treatment of suspected terrorists. But on the list of those deserving
credit,
the first is a group hardly anyone would have predicted: American
Muslims.
Millions
of Muslims live in the United
States. Had even a tiny percentage been radicalized enough to commit
violence,
they could have done immense damage. Despite all the efforts to upgrade
security at a few crucial sites, it really wouldn’t be hard for any
group to
kill lots of people.
A
car bomb in a stadium parking lot, a
couple of semi-automatic rifles in a shopping mall, a Molotov cocktail
in a
crowded bus, a bomb on a railroad track, a runaway pickup on a city
sidewalk --
there’s an endless list of easy pickings.
There
are too many targets to secure
them all. It would have been a simple task for a handful of minimally
trained
volunteers to keep us in a constant state of fear.
But
the volunteers, with rare
exceptions, didn’t come forward. Charles Kurzman, a sociologist at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes in Foreign Policy
magazine
that “approximately a dozen people in the country were convicted in the
five
years after 9/11 for having links with al-Qaida” and “fewer than 40
Muslim
Americans planned or carried out acts of domestic terrorism.”
That
may sound like a lot, until you
remember that there are 15,000 murders a year in this country. A report
from
the Rand Corp., a national security think tank, noted that of 83
terrorist
attacks that took place between 9/11 and the end of 2009, only three
“were
clearly connected with the jihadist cause.” Three!
Read
the rest of the column at Townhall
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