Is New York City's Anti-Terrorism Progam The Way To Go?

Photo: New York's Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly

Terror Target: Manhattan -- Judith Miller, Wall Street Journal

New York's police commissioner says it's a big mistake to write off failed attacks as the work of incompetents, and he's developed his own intelligence apparatus to make sure they don't succeed.

What rankles Raymond W. Kelly? Two things, he tells me as we sip lukewarm coffee in his conference room on the 14th floor of One Police Plaza, the dilapidated police headquarters overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge.

The first, New York's police commissioner tells me, is "incompetence," an inescapable fact-of-life, or so it would seem, in any large bureaucracy (he has 50,000 employees). A second is the media's tendency to downplay New York's hard-won victories against terrorism—the failure or foiling of some 11 serious plots against the city since 2001—by describing the would-be perpetrators as incompetent or stupid.

Read more ....

My Comment: I have always believed that the reason why most terror attacks have failed in the U.S. (in the past few years) has been because of incompetence and/or bad luck. This article gives an opposite point of view.