Tag: brussels bombings
Over Here: Competence Amid Repulsive Politics

Over Here: Competence Amid Repulsive Politics

Belgians planning to “march against fear” Sunday were told to stay home out of fear for more violence. Americans in Europe, meanwhile, are being advised to “exercise vigilance.” What about Americans in America?

Over here, there’s a bizarre split screen of an intelligent response to a serious terrorist threat and a major political party descending into unbridled stupidity. Would either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz please get a grip and say something grown-up like “I refuse to discuss my wife or yours”?

One could try to compartmentalize the 60-vehicle pileup wreck on the Republican side as an oddity that will pass once a Democrat is elected the next president. The problem is that the spectacle has real-world consequences for the United States and its interests. The more absurd our politicians look the less powerful we seem.

But there’s the other, nobler half of the screen. Americans could swell with pride at the interview in a Belgian hospital of Mason Wells, the grievously wounded 19-year-old from Utah. Head covered in bandages, the Mormon missionary calmly described his painful experience and then extended sympathy to fellow sufferers. Wells expressed hope that they “feel the love that others have for them and how much we feel for them.”

As for the U.S. government response to the massacre, it largely rang with the sound of competence. When Rep. Michael McCaul, head of the House Committee on Homeland Security, was asked about the failings of European security, he answered diplomatically, “Europe is in a pre-9/11 posture.”

McCaul could have lit up Twitter with some lively condemnations of Old Europe. He could have said that many of these countries are reaping the whirlwind of their laziness and passivity toward a growing jihadist threat. But he didn’t, and that was a good thing. Time to move forward.

This country is definitely post-9/11, which is why much of our law enforcement has worked out intelligent responses to horrific events elsewhere. The New York Police Department leads these efforts with a dozen detectives doing surveillance work in other countries.

Whenever a terrorist attack happens elsewhere, the NYPD springs into action. John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, explained:

In the first hours, the department tries to ascertain whether an attack was European- or Asian-based or otherwise local or part of a global set of actions. And it tries to make sure there’s not a connection with something going on in New York.

As part of the operation, officers are immediately posted at vulnerable locations. “We launched this last one at 4 o’clock in the morning,” Miller said, “and by the rush hour, we had the entire city covered at key nodes.”

The department also sends teams of investigators to the sites of foreign attacks, be they in Paris, Sydney or Mumbai. And they try to dissect the nature of each assault.

Was the attack just “inspired” by terrorists’ leveraging of social media, as occurred in San Bernardino, California? Or was it “enabled” through direct contact with assailants on U.S. soil — people told where to strike and when?

Finally, sophisticated law enforcement is burdened with undoing the damage caused by bigmouths on the campaign trail. For instance, Cruz made a demand to “patrol and secure” Muslim communities in this country. Problem is, some of the best intelligence comes from these same communities.

“Patrol and secure,” Miller complained, “was a subtext for occupy and intimidate.” In the wake of this verbal damage, Miller added, the NYPD is trying to reassure law-abiding local Muslims that law enforcement is working with, not against, them.

So on one side of the Great American Jumbotron is political humiliation. On the other, government readiness. Over there, the screen is entirely grim.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: A man wrapped in a Belgian flag sits next to a statue as people gather on the Place de la Bourse to pay tribute to the victims of Tuesday’s bomb attacks in Brussels, Belgium, March 26, 2016. The writing reads, “Brussels, I love you”. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir 

Belgian Police Break Up Street Protests As Attack Investigation Widens

Belgian Police Break Up Street Protests As Attack Investigation Widens

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Belgian police briefly used water cannon to control several hundred rowdy protesters in central Brussels on Sunday after they ignored an official call for marches to be postponed following Tuesday’s bombings.

Amid fears of further attacks, officials wanted to give police the scope to focus on investigations which have widened to other countries, leading to the arrest of an Algerian in Italy and intelligence cooperation with Germany. Police carried out 13 new raids in Belgium itself.

Hundreds nevertheless gathered at the Bourse to express solidarity with the victims of the suicide bomb attacks at Brussels airport and on a rush-hour metro train. Thirty one people were killed, including three attackers, and hundreds more injured. Islamic State has claimed responsibility.

Most of the protests were peaceful but white-helmeted riot police used the water cannon against a group of protesters, many of whom local media described as right-wing nationalists, who burst onto the square chanting and carrying banners denouncing Islamic State.

“It is highly inappropriate that protesters have disrupted the peaceful reflection at the Bourse (stock exchange). I strongly condemn these disturbances,” Prime Minister Charles Michel said according to Belga news agency.

Brussels Mayor Yvan Mayeur said the group were “scoundrels”.

In and around Brussels and Antwerp, police carried out 13 new raids in connection with the attacks, with nine people questioned and five later released, the prosecutor’s office said.

With links to the Paris attacks in November becoming clearer, and amid criticism that Europe has not done enough to share intelligence about suspected Islamist militants, cooperation appeared to be deepening.

Belgian press agency Belga said on Sunday prosecutors had charged a man in connection with a raid in Paris on Thursday that authorities say foiled an apparent attack plot.

Belga named him as Abderamane A. who prosecutors had said on Saturday was being held after being shot in a raid in the Brussels district of Schaerbeek.

After a series of raids in Belgium and Germany, Italian police also arrested Algerian Djamal Eddine Ouali who is suspected of making documents for militants linked to the bombings, Italian media said on Saturday.

His name was found in documents in a raid on an apartment near Brussels last October, including some with photos of militants involved in the attacks in Paris and in Brussels and the aliases they used.

 

Web Of Links

As the web of links between the suspects and attacks emerges, German lawmakers said Europe urgently needed to improve the way its security agencies shared information.

But Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office was among the European security agencies still hunting for at least eight mostly French or Belgian suspects, Die Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported. They are thought to be on the run in Syria or Europe.

Belgian prosecutors also charged three men on Saturday including Faycal C., whom Belgian media identified as Faycal Cheffou and said he was “the man in the hat”, as he has become known, in last Tuesday’s airport CCTV footage that showed three men pushing baggage trolleys.

However, investigators have not confirmed that Cheffou is that man, a person close to the investigation told Reuters.

A video posted on social media outlets used by Islamic State on Saturday showed a Belgian militant in the group’s de facto capital Raqqa, Syria, taunting his home country in Flemish.

“You learned nothing from the lessons of Paris, because you continued fighting Islam and the Muslims. For this I want to tell you that the attack in Brussels is reaping what you had sown with your own hands,” Hicham Chaib, whose nom de guerre was given as Abu Hanifa al-Beljiki, said.

“Just as you bomb the Muslims with your F-16s, we will fight your people.”

The authenticity of the video could not immediately be verified by Reuters.

Officials said 24 victims from nine different nationalities had been identified so far from the attacks in Brussels, where the European Union and NATO have their headquarters. Fourteen were identified at the airport and 10 on the metro. A further four people remain unidentified.

In addition, 340 people were wounded, according to the latest official toll on Saturday, of whom 101 are still in hospital, 62 of them in intensive care, many with severe burns.

Away from the protests on the Bourse square, Brussels was largely quiet on Sunday, with many celebrating Easter but Monseigneur Jozef De Kesel, archbishop of Brussels, told Reuters it would be difficult to celebrate as usual.

“The foundations of our society, freedom, respect for others, have been hit, attacked,” he said.

 

(Additional reporting by Hortense de Roffignac and Herve Veloes in Brussels and Caroline Copley in Berlin; Writing by Anna Willard; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

Photo: Right-wing demonstrators protest against the wave of terrorism in front of the old stock exchange in Brussels, Belgium. March 27. 2016.   REUTERS/Yves Herman

Endorse This: Donald Trump Makes His ISIS Debut

Endorse This: Donald Trump Makes His ISIS Debut

A few months ago, the media went a bit overboard with their hunch that Donald Trump’s rhetoric was feeding into ISIS’s propaganda machine. Even Hillary Clinton parroted the claim, despite the lack of any video evidence. It is true, though, that Trump was featured in a video for al Qaeda affiliate Al Shebab in January.

In a new video, which Mother Jonesreports allegedly comes from the pro-ISIS Al-Battar Media Foundation, burning rubble flashes across the screen as recordings of several voices, including Donald Trump calling in for an interview on Fox Business, play in the background.

“Brussels was one of the great cities — one of the most beautiful cities of the world 20 years ago — and safe,” Trump says. “And now it’s a horror show — an absolute horror show.”

I won’t post the entire video here. If you really want to see it, you can find the full thing online. Yahoo excerpted Donald Trump’s feature in the ad:

It’s fascinating that, of all of Trump’s outrageous statements, this is the one that made its way onto an ISIS video. Where’s all the rhetoric about banning Muslims from entering the U.S., or “bombing the shit out of” the extremist group?

Actually, the audio used in the propaganda video is pretty typical of what ISIS uses in recruiting. The group advertises that it’s in an eschatological war with the West, and that their attacks on major European cities are part of a larger battle that will end with the Armageddon.

When Donald Trump says that Brussels is now “an absolute horror show,” he’s saying just what ISIS wants: not that they’re a radical group under intense bombing from America and allies, quickly losing strength and increasingly unpopular with potential recruits; but rather that they’re winning this war. If Brussels is a horror show, as this video conveys, then the war against the West is succeeding.

Republicans often mock President Obama’s downplaying of ISIS as a weakness of his, but in reality, he’s sticking to the script that counterterrorism analysts recommend: that this group must and will be destroyed, but we can’t play into their narrative to do it.

France Says It Foils Advanced Attack Plot: Minister

France Says It Foils Advanced Attack Plot: Minister

PARIS (Reuters) – A French national suspected of belonging to a militant network planning an attack in France was arrested on Thursday morning, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

The arrest helped “foil a plot in France that was at an advanced stage,” Cazeneuve said on Thursday night in a televised address from his ministry.

“The individual questioned, a French national, is suspected of high-level involvement in this plan. He was part of a terrorist network that planned to strike France,” Cazeneuve said.

Following the arrest by the French counterterrorism service, DGSI, the agency carried out a raid on Thursday night at an apartment building in Argenteuil, a suburb in northern Paris, he said.

“At this stage, there is no tangible evidence that links this plot to the attacks in Paris and Brussels,” said Cazeneuve, who was in the Belgian capital earlier on Thursday.

French radio station France Info reported that the man had been sentenced in Belgium for belonging to a jihadist network. French TV station ITele reported that explosives had been found in the man’s house.

The arrest came two days after suicide bombers hit the Brussels airport and a metro train, killing at least 31 people and wounding some 270 in the worst such attack in Belgian history.

In November, 130 people were killed in Paris in coordinated attacks on cafes, a sports stadium and a concert hall. The Islamic State militant group has claimed responsibility for both the Paris and Brussels attacks.

 

(Reporting by Miriam Rivet, Geert De Clercq and John Irish; Editing by Sandra Maler and Peter Cooney)

Photo: French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve talks to journalists after a meeting about blasts in Brussels at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, March 22, 2016. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentese