Counterterrorism Blog

Earlier this week, France announced the arrest of a number of Muslims suspected of providing aid to insurgent forces in Iraq.  Yesterday, the prosecutor's office released a statement which claimed that the suspected Islamists were plotting attacks on French and foreign targets in the country.

While the prosecutor's office did not elaborate on that statement, details will almost certainly surface as the prosecution proceeds.  This story is worth following because in the past we gave short shrift to terrorist plots that failed, and thus missed important clues about what the terrorists may have been planning in the future.  With the benefit of hindsight, it's now easy to see the significance of the laptop seized from Ramzi Yousef's hotel room in the Philippines back in 1995 which contained, among other things, a plan to simultaneously blow up a dozen American jumbo jets flying over the Pacific; a plan to dive-bomb an airplane into CIA headquarters; and a plan to hijack a commercial airplane and crash it into a Washington, DC landmark.  One can also now appreciate the importance of the December 1994 hijacking of an Air France flight in Algiers by the Armed Islamic Group, which intended to either explode the plane over Paris or else crash it into the Eiffel Tower.

Details of foiled plots can provide important signals of what the terrorists will attempt in the future.  And foiled plots are also worthy of our attention because if we focus only on those terrorist attacks that actually succeed -- to the exclusion of those plots that law enforcement is able to break up -- then we may end up underestimating the magnitude of the terrorist threat.