Brussels investigation hampered by mistakes

What happened?

Belgian authorities faced mounting criticism at home and throughout Europe this week after admitting they had committed a series of security errors both before and after the suicide bombings in Brussels. Belgian police have arrested at least 18 suspects since last week’s ISIS-directed attacks on the city’s airport and subway, which killed 32 people, including at least four Americans. Only one person, Belgian freelance journalist Fayçal Cheffou, was charged directly in connection with the terrorist assaults—but was then released hours later in a possible case of mistaken identity. Authorities originally suspected Cheffou was the third Zaventem airport attacker spotted in surveillance footage; that suspect is believed to have fled the scene when his explosives failed to detonate. But DNA tests failed to place Cheffou at the airport. As the investigation continued, a mob of 400 far-right demonstrators overran a memorial to the Brussels victims, chanting “Belgie barst”—“Break up Belgium,” a Flemish nationalist slogan.

Police in Italy, France, and Germany arrested several new suspects linked to the Brussels attacks as well as November’s terrorist rampage in Paris, which left 130 people dead. Security officials said they were increasingly confident that the Brussels and Paris atrocities were carried out by a single terrorist cell. But French President François Hollande warned that even as that cell was “in the process of being wiped out,” other terrorist networks were plotting new outrages.

What the editorials said

Belgian authorities have some explaining to do, said The Wall Street Journal. They could have arrested suspected airport bomber Ibrahim el-Bakraoui last year when he was deported to Europe by Turkey, which told Belgian officials the Brussels-born extremist had been detained “near the Syrian border on suspicion of belonging to the Islamic State.” Then, just days before the Brussels attack, Belgian police captured Salah Abdeslam, the alleged logistical mastermind of the Paris attacks. But they questioned him “for only an hour”—and failed to ask about any future ISIS plots. The European Union has all Belgium’s security problems “on a larger scale,” said The Washington Post. The bloc’s 28 member nations have failed to coordinate on even simple intelligence pooling, and can’t agree on basic questions like “whether mass electronic surveillance is an appropriate counterterrorism measure.”

The West needs to work together to defeat the Islamist threat, said the Tampa Bay Times. Yet Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump would have us “withdraw from security challenges” under his “America First” foreign policy strategy. The billionaire has called for the U.S. to rein in its involvement in NATO and in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, just when our allies most need America’s “robust presence” and intelligence-gathering abilities

What the columnists said

“The Islamic State’s lone-wolf era is over,” said Matthew Levitt in ForeignPolicy.com. Forget small acts of violence by self-radicalized individuals; after Paris and Brussels, it’s clear ISIS is determined to direct attacks “that are far more sophisticated and lethal.” Security officials believe one terrorist network in Europe is at the heart of this violence, said Rukmini Callimachi in The New York Times. That cell was once headed by Belgian national Abdelhamid Abaaoud, whom experts believe spent two years arming and training an unknown number of European jihadists before blowing himself up in Paris.

So, “is America next?” asked Daniel Benjamin in Politico.com. An attack on U.S. soil is much less likely—not least because America has been much more successful at assimilating Muslim immigrants than Europe. We’ve also spent $650 billion on improving homeland security since 9/11 and have “the blessing of geography—two oceans that mean that outside extremists will need to fly to get here.”

For those reasons and others, Americans overestimate how much of a threat terrorism poses, said Jeremy Shapiro in Vox.com. Constant media coverage of Paris and Brussels has put vivid pictures in our heads of broken bodies and burnt-out airport terminals. But the reality is that we’ve had relatively few terrorist attacks in the U.S., while in 2015 there were 372 mass shootings that killed 475 people and wounded 1,870. Americans are all also far more at risk of dying in a car crash than a terrorist attack, but terrorism is effective precisely because it creates levels of fear that overwhelm reason. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”