By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, January 02, 2025
Shortly after we rang in the new year, two men — using the same car-rental app — took rented vehicles to the
heart of two great American cities and tried to kill as many people as
possible.
Authorities have now identified the driver of the Tesla Cybertruck — who was killed when the
vehicle blew up outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas — as Colorado
resident and Army veteran Matthew Livelsberger. Reportedly Livelsberger and the
perpetrator of the New Orleans attack, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, both served at Fort
Bragg (now named Fort Liberty), but there’s not yet any confirmation that the
two men served there simultaneously or that they knew each other. Keep in mind, “Ten percent of the Army’s forces are
assigned to Fort Liberty including 50,662 military and 14,036 Department of
Defense civilian personnel who work there,” and the base “spans across 160,700
acres or 251 square miles. The compound is so large that it touches four
counties.” So even if the two men served at Fort Bragg at the same time, it’s
conceivable they never encountered each other.
Whatever you think of the U.S. “war on terror” and
whether it ever ended, the threat of terrorism never completely disappeared.
You may not be interested in terrorism, but terrorism is interested in you.
The car bomb in Las Vegas killed one person and injured
at least seven more. When you detonate a truck made by the company of Elon Musk
in front of a hotel with Donald Trump’s name on it, I think the political
message of the attack is awfully darn clear. Nonetheless, the New York Times reports that as of yesterday, the FBI was still attempting to determine
whether placing gas canisters, camp fuel canisters, and large firework mortars
in a car associated with Musk, and in front of a building associated with
Trump, meets their technical definition of “terrorism”:
“There is no further threat to the
community,” [Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police
Department] said. As of Wednesday afternoon, there was no indication that the
explosion was connected to ISIS, which President Biden said had inspired the
New Orleans attack, but the investigation remains ongoing, he said.
At a news conference on Wednesday,
Jeremy Schwartz, the acting F.B.I. special agent in charge in Las Vegas, said
the agency is investigating whether the explosion “was an act of terrorism or
not.”
“I know everybody’s interested in
that word and trying to see if we can say, ‘Hey this is a terrorist attack,’”
Mr. Schwartz said. “That is our goal, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Does anyone in the FBI seriously think the choice of
vehicle and location for detonation were just coincidences?
This hesitancy to call detonating a car explosion in the
center of Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve “terrorism” comes after Alethea Duncan,
New Orleans FBI assistant special agent in charge, initially said in a
press conference, “As [New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne] Kirkpatrick
said, we’ll be taking over the investigative lead for this event. This is not a
terrorist event. What it is right now, is there improvised explosive devices
that was found [sic], and we are working on confirming if this is a viable
device or not [sic].”
If you’re finding improvised explosive devices — whether
they’re viable or not — why would you declare that it is not a terrorist event?
The FBI subsequently declared in a written statement, “We
are working with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism.”
But it often feels as if in circumstances like this the
FBI has a definition of “terrorism” that is as specific and pedantic as Rob Lowe’s character’s definition of champagne in Wayne’s
World. Unless it is imported from the specific “Terrorista” region
of the Islamic State, it’s merely sparkling mass violence.
In the case of the New Orleans attack, it may well be
that Shamsud-Din Jabbar was a troubled guy, with a life unraveling from a messy
divorce, increasing debts, and failed business ventures — your garden-variety
angry, middle-aged man lashing out at a world that he feels has done him wrong.
But the investigation has reportedly turned up a series of videos where he “discussed
planning to kill his family and having dreams that helped inspire him to join
ISIS.” In other words, whether he was ever a “member” of ISIS, he turned to
ISIS to give his life purpose and meaning. (Straight out of someone’s twisted fiction.)
When Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove into
a crowd of New Year’s revelers with a pickup truck flying an Islamic State flag
and then engaged in a shootout with the police, his psychopathic, murderous
intent shocked the nation. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t have. This tactic is a
well-known and celebrated ISIS calling card. The carnage on Bourbon Street is
the direct descendant of the 2016 Islamic State truck rampage in Nice, France,
that killed 86 people and injured hundreds of others. It’s the deranged
offspring of the 2016 attack in Berlin’s Christmas market that killed 13. It’s
the direct follow-up to the 2017 truck attack that killed eight people and
injured a dozen others on Manhattan’s West Side.
There have been many other such
incidents over the years, including in London, in Spain, and in Canada.
Around midafternoon yesterday, when it became clear that
the country has suffered two simultaneous terrorist attacks, people started to
notice that the only response from President Joe Biden had been a two-paragraph
released statement that he was being “continually briefed.”
Finally, in the early evening hours, our squinty,
mumbling president read off a teleprompter for four minutes and after
pledging, “We will keep you fully, contemporaneously informed,” served up the
trademark move of his administration by turning from the podium and ignoring
the shouted questions.
Our Jeff Blehar expressed what almost everyone is
thinking but can’t seem to say out loud:
Was anyone reassured by that
speech? Did it alleviate anyone’s unease that the sitting president of the
United States is a half-functional, quasi-vegetative person at this point?
I am also here to ask why we as
Americans have become so cavalier about the fact that tolerating a president
who is permanently mentally incapacitated invites crises like these.
Nineteen days yet remain until the animate shell of Joe Biden formally departs
from the presidency. Pray for peace and hold your breath until then.
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