General Alexander is quite right, and it’s even worse than he thinks. He talks here about al Qaeda, but the threat is much larger than al Qaeda. The threat, in fact, involves adherents of a belief system that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials are forbidden to study, because it is the official dogma of the regime that that belief system is harmless and peaceful, and thus the fact that the perpetrators of terror attacks are simply wrong when they point to it as their motivation and inspiration, and their words can be disregarded.
This official idiocy makes it difficult, if not impossible, for those whose job it is to protect us to study the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy us. And that makes it easier for the enemy, as no one can defeat an enemy he does not understand. As I show in my book Arab Winter Comes to America (order here; Kindle edition here), this politically correct willful ignorance led directly to the Boston Marathon jihad bombing and the Fort Hood jihad massacre, both of which could have, should have, and would have been prevented were not our law enforcement and intelligence agencies trapped in a politically correct straitjacket.
“‘A lot more terror attacks coming our way:’ former NSA chief,” by Adam Edelman, New York Daily News, May 18, 2014:
A former top U.S. security official fears the nation could be attacked again by terrorists.
Gen. Keith Alexander, who retired in March as director of the National Security Agency after eight years on the job, said the probability of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil is increasing.
“The number of attacks that are coming, the probability, it’s growing,” Alexander said in a New Yorker magazine interview published over the weekend. “What I saw at N.S.A. is that there is a lot more coming our way.”
“We’re at greater risk,” Alexander said. “Look at the way Al Qaeda networks. From Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb, and now in Syria, the al-Nusra front.”
“Look at the number of jihadists going into Syria and what they want to do. When put all that together, you can say those are distant countries, but a lot of these groups are looking to attack the United States. I take that threat very seriously”, Alexander added, stressing the need to use controversial spying tactics to help combat terrorism.
Alexander claimed that such tactics — including the agency’s bulk-metadata collection program (which many lawmakers have claimed is unconstitutional) — have contributed to the disruption to at least 54 terrorist plots.
The program, along with another NSA strategy called “reasonable articulable suspicion,” may have even prevented the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Alexander said.
“We know we didn’t stop 9/11. People were trying, but they didn’t have the tools,” he said. “This tool, we believed, would help them.”