Paris updates

The death toll from the attacks in Paris Friday has risen to 129 souls. That count includes one American, Nohemi Gonzalez, a student who was visiting Europe from California. US intelligence services are blaming Edward Snowden for their failures to detect these types of attacks, according to Yahoo News;

Over the past year, current and former intelligence officials tell Yahoo News, IS terror suspects have moved to increasingly sophisticated methods of encrypted communications, using new software such as Tor, that intelligence agencies are having difficulty penetrating — a switch that some officials say was accelerated by the disclosures of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The result played out in deadly fashion in Paris: At least eight terrorists, armed with heavy weaponry and suicide vests, and most likely aided by a support network, plotted and executed a highly elaborate mass casualty attack on multiple targets without the French or any other Western intelligence agency having a clue.

Well, see, I disagree. It looks like a fellow was arrested in Bavaria on Friday morning. He was carrying weapons and explosives in his car from Montenegro. His GPS was set to an address in Paris.

The Belgians have arrested three more folks in Brussels who may be connected to the attack in Paris. You might remember that there was a mass shooting in Brussels this last Spring at the Holocaust Museum there. From Reuters;

A French prosecutor said a car hired in Belgium was linked to the attacks and that a Frenchman living in Brussels rented it and was later stopped early on Saturday at the Belgian border.

A parking ticket issued in Molenbeek was found in the hire car in Paris. Officials declined comment on reports that the attacks may have been largely plotted in Brussels, that one of three attack teams came from there and that at least three of the attackers were based in the European Union capital.

Proportionately, Belgium has contributed more Europeans to ISIS’ war in Syria than any other EU country – about 300 by the last count.

U.S. officials have tended to describe the threat as mostly coming from “lone wolves” — what one described as disgruntled “glory seekers.” They have downplayed the idea that IS had either the intention or ability to carry out the sort of spectacular attacks such as 9/11 that had been the hallmark of al-Qaida.

“They had made blustery statements in the past,” said Matthew Olsen, who until last year served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), about IS.

But the group had not shown they could execute highly sophisticated attacks on Western soil. “We hadn’t seen that,” said Olsen. “They hadn’t proven they could do that.”

While he said the Paris attacks — similar in some ways to the 2008 attack on multiple targets in Mumbai, India, by an al-Qaida allied Pakistani terror group — “shouldn’t be a surprise,” Olsen said U.S. intelligence agencies will now have to reassess their judgment of what IS is capable of. “They’ll have to recalibrate the assessment,” he said. And that inevitably means the prospect of a similar mass casualty strike inside the United States.

Yeah, well, it doesn’t take much to coordinate a large scale attack like the one in Paris with just a few people – all you have to do is give them each a watch. I’m only surprised that it took them this long to use this particular mode of terrorizing the West.

Category: Terror War