For almost nine years now the U.S. has waged a Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). The information from the most recent terrorist, from the enraged Army major to the hapless Christmas bomber to the bungling New York City bomber, is being reported to be individual acts to terrorize the American population.
Unfortunately, there are those who believe that the Fort Hood massacre was just another horrible work place shooting and the would be bombers in New York City and on the Christmas airplane were manipulated and brainwashed to do what they did.
The question is, was all this a carefully planned terrorist act or was it a “lone wolf?”
Maybe the nature of terrorism is changing to what someone has called a “leaderless resistance.”
The individual lone wolf Islamic extremist is now less likely to come to the attention of law enforcement and intelligence agencies than four sets of terrorists hijacking airplanes on 9/11/2001 or the “Fort Dix Six.”
It might help if the government could agree on the definition or terrorist and the GWOT. It even seems that our Attorney General has great difficulty understanding any of this by his own testimony or lack thereof before Congress.
It may be that Al Qaeda no longer plays any major leadership role for terrorist except in war torn combat zones. Maybe the idea is to empower motivated individuals to initiate acts of terrorism without support from the dispersed Al Qaeda leadership.
We now see extensive use of the Internet for communication and recruiting and a new English language publication for the world to read.
It seems that the terrorist mentioned above were all motivated by some form of the extremist propaganda that is being widely distributed in a variety of means.
The GWOT has not gone away and the nonsense of the Washington Post “expose” of our intelligence activities doesn’t help but to make us look like fools and vulnerable to the would be individual terrorist.
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Thomas Jefferson
