Sunday, May 9, 2010

Terror Plots Less Isolated, More Connected

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin is properly calling attention to the administration's strange and ultimately self-defeating tendency to call every terrorist attack an isolated incident. It's kind of like those ordinary criminal defense lawyers hanging around the courthouse arguing that their client is a good kid who merely got involved in bad crowd. If every kid is good, where does the bad crowd come from?
One of the most troubling tics of Team Obama is the frantic rush to declare that every terror attack on American soil is carried out by an isolated individual with no connection to al Qaeda or other groups. It was the gist of their rapid response to the failed airline bombing on Christmas Day, to the Fort Hood shooter and, most recently, to the plot by Faisal Shahzad to set off a car bomb in Times Square...
It's a reasonable theory, but it has a problem. The claims have been dead wrong in all three cases. Each "lone wolf" was quickly shown to have had contacts with or received training from a terror group abroad.