JUDITH MILLER: NYC terror attack: Halloween horror would have been much worse without top notch NYPD.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo pointed out another hallmark of a vehicle assault. The perp, he said, was one of those “lone wolves” who “meant to cause pain and harm and probably death and the resulting terror.”
But it takes a pack to raise a lone wolf. Even if Saipov acted alone, he was part of a growing ideological fraternity numbering in the tens of thousands who now inhabit every region of the globe.
Those seeking eternal glory have staged similar attacks in at least a dozen other cities—from Nice to Paris to Barcelona to London to Jerusalem.
Like the attacks in these cities, the Halloween attack in Lower Manhattan was aimed at inflicting maximum carnage. Schools in the area were letting out students shortly after three o’clock when Saipov drove his rented truck off West Houston Street onto the bike path.
There was no shortage of targets. The streets between West Houston and Chambers were crowded with parents picking up their costumed children prepared for an evening of trick-or-treating. Pedestrians and bikers on the Hudson River bike path were stunned and helpless as Saipov careened his weapon through the crowd.
With the collapse of its self-declared “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, ISIS is on the run. So are its adherents. But as the extremists disperse, the terrorist threat, paradoxically, increases. American and other intelligence agencies have long warned of a likely rise in vehicle and other attacks as the frustrated, furious faithful are forced to reorient their campaign. In May 2017, the U.S. Transportation and Security Agency (TSA) warned truck and bus companies to be on guard for suspicious individuals seeking to rent vehicles.
According to TSA data, Islamist terrorists have carried out more than a dozen vehicular assaults since 2014 that have killed more than 170 people. Such attacks are ever more likely, the TSA memo warned, since “unsophisticated tactics such as vehicle-ramming” are hard to prevent and capable of inflicting “mass casualties if successful.”
Saipov might have killed even more people had the NYPD not been the nation’s premier counterterrorism force. NYPD officers showed up in force minutes after the attack began, shooting Saipov before he could kill even more New Yorkers.
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Even more essential has been the NYPD’s intelligence division, which has long collected information about suspicious individuals. After being heavily, and in many instances unfairly, criticized for allegedly violating civil liberties, Miller’s former boss, William Bratton, shut down a particularly controversial program that the intelligence unit had run early in its existence—a so-called “demographic unit” that collected information on the location and activities of Muslims suspected of terrorist intentions.
Another critic was New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who lambasted the NYPD for surveilling New Jersey-based Muslims and asked whether the spying was “borne out of arrogance, or out of paranoia, or out of both.” Unconfirmed news reports Tuesday night indicated that Saipov had lived for some time in Paterson, New Jersey.
But the NYPD has not scaled back most of its vital surveillance activities.
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