Say Anything Blog

And the war on terror rolls on…

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany has arrested three men it suspects of planning “massive bomb attacks” on U.S. installations and belonging to a domestic cell of the Islamic Jihad militant group, German officials said on Wednesday.

Federal prosecutor Monika Harms told a news conference that the men, two German nationals and one Turk, had obtained enough materials to make a bomb with an explosive power equal to 550-kilogrammes of TNT and that an attack appeared imminent.

“Thanks to the cooperation of federal and local police over several months we were able to discover and pursue the planning and preparation and in the end prevent massive bomb attacks,” Harms told a news conference.

Harms said she could not confirm reports that the accused were targeting the Frankfurt airport and U.S. military base in Ramstein, but said they had been observed scouting out U.S. installations such as discos, pubs, or airports.

News of the arrests comes a day after Danish police conducted raids and took into custody eight young Muslims they suspect of plotting a bomb attack and having links to al Qaeda.

Reports of arrests like this one are almost becoming…routine.  Every month or two we hear of a new plot foiled by intelligence and law enforcement agents, and it’s gratifying to know that they’re able to stop stuff like this.  But it’s worth remembering that as good as our intelligence is, and as good as our cops are at stopping these people, if we don’t do something about the hateful ideology that is driving them to attempt these plots eventually one of them is going to work.

And when it does anywhere from dozens (like in the UK train bombings) to hundreds (like in the Madrid bombings) to thousands (9/11) will die.

This is why the mission in Iraq is so important.  If we complete our mission the end result is a nation with a representative government in the middle of the middle east that has friendly military ties with us.  That not only creates shockwaves of support for democracy in that oppressed region, it also gives us good tactical position from which to address other threats in the middle east.

I know nobody wants to hear it, but if we truly want to combat the Islamic radicalism that is the driving force behind all these terror plots around the globe we are going to have to have boots on the ground in the middle east for at least the next decade.  We need to either accept that, or just resign ourselves to the reality of there being nothing more than a “thin blue line” of law enforcement between ourselves and terrorism.