Two recent polls suggest that Americans are still well aware of the threats to the nation’s security. A Fox News poll found that four out of ten Americans think that the nation is less safe today than before 9/11. Overall, however, 51% thought it was safer. A Rasmussen poll found that respondents thought that an attack on the scale of 9/11 was entirely possible. At least 69% felt that way.
Twelve years past 9/11, it’s a good time to ask or at least conjecture about how safe we are from another attack by Islamic extremists.
On May 1, 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen attempted to pull off a terrorist car bombing in New York’s Times Square. Two street venders spotted smoke coming from the vehicle and alerted police. The bomb had been ignited but had failed to explode and was disarmed.
On August 28, 2013, Nidal Malik Hasan, formerly a psychiatrist with the United States Army Medical Corps, was sentenced to death at the conclusion of his court-martial. Four years earlier on November 5, 2009, he had fatally shot 13 soldiers and injured more than thirty other at Fort Hood. Hasan’s behavior and comments had given so many signals that, in retrospect, it raises the question of why he was not booted out of the Army for the risk he posed. The Obama administration called it “workplace violence”, not an act of terrorism.
On April 15, 2014, in Boston, we learned that not only could terrorists strike at will, but could do so even though Russian intelligence authorities had warned U.S. law enforcement that the Dzhokhar and Tamerian Tsarnaev were a threat. The FBI concluded they could not tap their phones or conduct a more thorough investigation.