Counter-terrorism business flourishes
The new paradigm is that "law enforcement" and the military is the primary target
(I’ve been lost in a three-month investigation relating to submarines, coming out in Newsweek soon, but have a backup of new reports, secret organizations, and codenames to share.)
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), “Foreign Terrorist–Inspired, –Enabled, and –Directed Attacks in the United States Since 9/11, as of February 2023,” 16 March 2023.
One could read this new NCTC report as an argument that the war on terror is not over, that attacks in the United States haven’t really declined; they’ve merely morphed from al Qaeda to other (mostly) Muslim adherents. Or one could read it as as affirmation that the counter-terrorism industry has been successful, that it has stopped another “9/11.” Or one could argue, as both the Obama and Trump administrations argued, that ISIS has also been defeated, as is exemplifed even in the reduction in ISIS-related attacks. I read it slightly differently.
First, one important caveat. Like most of these domestic terrorism “intelligence” reports, this one says nothing, breaks no ground, nor does it tell us anything we don’t already know. Its purpose is to say hey, look at us, we’re still here, and the threat is still here. This is not to say that NCTC doesn’t do anything, but it is to say that they need to advertise a bit, if only to their state and local level constituents, that they shouldn’t take their eye off the ball. Even if they’ve demonstrated, now in the case of January 6th, that they are incapable of issuing useful warnings and if they do, those warnings get lost in the bureaucratic noise.
So what I take away is that the counter-terror hunters are very good at certain things — who’s getting on the plane — and pretty bad at others (like understanding the worldwide or domestic landscapes in a holistic manner and adjusting accordingly). That’s why with each attack and each “surprise” a new something has to be set up — a cell, a task force, a process, a new piece of software. This is what has happened since January 6th, and as this report demonstrates, there’s no plenty of idle space in the system to shift attention to “domestic-inspired” threats. It’s endless.
The big takeaway though, the specific one that you can take to the bank, is the sentence that says: “Since 2019, all but one of these attacks have targeted US law enforcement and military personnel.” (My emphasis added.) That’s a sentence that gets the juices flowing or the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and state and local police because there’s nothing more important to them than defending themselves.
See for yourself: