A tale of two terrorists

Jessica Reznicek is doing long prison time.

In 2021 she was sentenced to 8 years in prison with a domestic terrorism enhancement. ... Under normal conditions Jess would have been sentenced to 37 months, but the terrorism enhancement resulted in a sentence of 96 months.

The Des Moines Register unsympathetically describes her offense. Along with another woman, she

... repeatedly vandalized construction sites connected to the 1,172-mile [oil] pipeline in 2016 and 2017, setting a bulldozer on fire and using oxy-acetylene torches to damage pipeline valves across Iowa. The total cost of the damage is not known, but in one incident in Buena Vista County alone it was estimated at $2.5 million.

Nobody was hurt. Her protest damaged a corporation's bottom line and delayed the Dakota Access Pipeline much less than she, or many of us, would wish.

This tar sands oil pipeline could pollute the water supply of much of the Mississippi River Basin.

And more enhancements to the oil supply is the last thing any of us need in the era of climate change. 

Reznicek did not try to hide from the feds when they came after her. This was classic civil disobedience.

But to a federal judge thinks she's a "terrorist" and sentenced her accordingly.

• • •

Meanwhile Heather Cox Richardson reports that in Washington, D.C., the courts are confronted by an offender who sure seems to me a better fit for the "terrorist" label.

... the Department of Justice requested that the first defendant from the January 6 insurrection to be convicted at trial, Guy Reffitt, be sentenced to 15 years in prison. This is an upward adjustment of sentencing guidelines because the department is asking the judge to consider Reffitt’s actions as terrorism, since the offense for which he was convicted “was calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct.”  

Reffitt was a leader of the Texas Three Percenters militia gang, which calls for “rebellion” against the federal government. He came to Washington, D.C., for January 6. He attacked U.S. Capitol Police officers and encouraged others to do so before entering the Capitol armed with a handgun, where he targeted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).  

A camera on his helmet recorded Reffitt’s words that day. “I’m taking the Capitol with everybody f*cking else,” Reffitt told the people around him. “We’re all going to drag them m*therf*ckers out kicking and screaming. I don’t give a sh*t. I just want to see Pelosi’s head hit every f*cking stair on the way out. (Inaudible) F*ck yeah. And Mitch McConnell too. F*ck ‘em all. They f*cked us too many g*dd*mn years for too f*cking long. It’s time to take our country back. I think everybody’s on the same d*mn wavelength. And I think we have the numbers to make it happen…. [W]e’ve got a f*cking president. We don’t need much more. We just get rid of them m*therf*ckers and start over.” 

Afterward, he boasted, “We took the Capital [sic] of the United States of America and we will do it again.”

Now that's one scary guy. Prison is no good for anyone, But there are sure a lot of us who don't want him near by.

Terrorism begets terror

It really is that simple. Washington Post reporter Clyde McGrady has shared an intimate story of what it feels like to have some random young white weirdo come gunning for your community.  People in the Buffalo Black community are reeling under the trauma of the massacre.

Some struggle to understand the motivations of the killer. Some feel their insides burn with rage. Others pray — for the victims, for the killer, that those contemplating retaliation will turn away from anger.

Tricia Grannum needed to pick up a prescription.

“I’ve never felt like this, going into a store,” she told her mother when she got home. “I’ve never felt scared to get out of a car.”

This is what terrorism does to people who have reason to fear they are not going to find any lasting support. That seems to be Buffalo.

Go read it all.

Also worth reading is Washington Post media correspondent Margaret Sullivan's account of what's so wrong in Buffalo. She knows much. She edited the local paper before becoming a national voice for journalistic integrity.

What is to be done about hate cults?

It was heartening this morning to see that New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been both asking her police/counter-intelligence apparatus to investigate whether they ought to have come across clues about the killer in their midst -- and also was pushing to reduce the killing capacity of legal guns. Those are the sort of governmental measures which are appropriate after an atrocity like the Christchurch massacre.

But being human, we also ask, why? What makes a young man from an unremarkable Australian family (which was "shattered" by his crime) into a monster? Why do some individuals take a violent direction?

Deeyah Khan makes films about this question. Raised in Norway, the child of Afghan and Pakistani Muslim parents, and now a Brit, she calls herself "born in the West to parents from the East." In 2015, she used her facility in several worlds to create the documentary Jihad: A Story of the Others. It consists of her revealing interactions with British Muslims who had once been attracted to violent extremism, but who had eventually found other paths through which to express their cultures and serve their communities.

Then Khan jumped off what might look like the deep end into a cesspool of hate, filming US white nationalists in action at Charlottesville, at a rural martial arts training camp, and in their homes. Yes, she reports, there were times when she was plenty scared for herself, a lone, brown, Muslim woman among these posturing men. The product is White Right: Meeting The Enemy.
The film is gripping and affecting. It will surprise few reading here that the "intellectual" super-stars of hate like Jared Taylor seen in the trailer are a lot less interesting than the foot soldiers. The "leaders" are just making a buck off their cult; many of the guys in trenches of this vicious movement are better captured in what one says of himself:

"I was an egomaniac with no self-esteem."

Of course, sometimes people who are their targets die -- at Charlottesville, in Charleston, and at Christchurch.

Both Khan's documentaries are available from Netflix; highly recommended. ...Deeyah Khan shared challenging thoughts in a Vox interview about what we can do about these young men who endanger us all and who are suckers for far more evil people.

They want us to become really afraid; they want us to become divided; they want us to join their “us and them” thing. On a larger scale, I think we have to resist that. It’s an argument for celebrating and nurturing our diversity and nurturing our multicultural society, and our pluralism.

But on a more concrete, practical level, I think we need to support people who want to leave these groups, because we often underestimate how many people, once they’re in it, actually want to leave but find zero support, because everybody is so busy condemning these guys that nobody really wants to extend a hand to them and let them get out. I think that’s really, really important.

... I still feel positive and hopeful, because I do think change is possible, and I think it’s going to require us not giving up. All of these extremists want us to give up, to fear each other and them, to become more divided. And they don’t want us to be kind, or to show empathy, or to organize, or to vote, or to do any of that.

More in response to the Christchurch massacre

Christopher Dickey, a veteran foreign and war correspondent, is The Daily Beast’s World News Editor. Located in Paris, which has suffered so much terrorism, he brings a clear-eyed perspective to the atrocity in New Zealand.

At the end of the day, and as difficult as the task may be, the war on white nationalist terrorism must be fought as a war of law enforcement and a war of ideas.

Police and prosecutors loyal to democratic values have to pursue investigations into white nationalist groups with the same zeal that has been applied to radical Muslim terrorist organizations.

Voters in Western nations have to understand that the fellow travelers of white nationalist terrorism are not acceptable participants in modern democracies, and vote them out, or see that they are prosecuted, or both.

The Daily Beast

This is both true and very difficult to take in for people of the liberal left who are accustomed to having to struggle to contain "law enforcement" authorities who too often use their access to force to terrorize and oppress vulnerable communities. Even here in oh-so-progressive San Francisco, vile racist and homophobic texts among police officers have emerged into public view. "Officer Friendly" is hard to imagine. But we need her.

To contain the lawlessness of white nationalism, we need active counter-intelligence, cops, and courts. That means demanding that law enforcement come through for democracy. It means supporting whatever law-respecting professionals exist in that system who understand their job is protect all the people, not just the white ones. There isn't any other way. (And by the way, this is also what some of us said and thought in the awful wake of 9/11. That would have made for a safer world.)

As for the "war of ideas" -- that's harder for me to think through. White nationalism doesn't strike me as having any intellectual content except fear, transparent misinformation, and gooble-de-gook created by bigots to disguise how vacuous are their prejudices. I'm not going to invest brain cells in understanding the fables of some French novelist who is selling "replacement" of the white race by Muslims (presumably African?) or those of flim-flam man Steve Bannon. There's no there there.

All this makes me glad that somebody somewhere, including EP, is teaching students to think critically. Kudos to all teachers who do that vital work day after day.

Governments: do your damn job!

In 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, usually called ISIS in US media, broke into European and American consciousness with ugly videos of beheading of unfortunate western captives. Then they further intruded on our concern by attempting genocide against the Yazidis and overrunning parts of Iraq and Syria. The nations of the world mustered their superior technology and greater wealth of force and smashed this vicious bunch.

I'm something close to a pacifist. I've spent a life criticizing how the US throws its weight around in other peoples' countries. But I'm not distressed by the suppression of ISIS. If there is any circumstance in which government is justified in using its overwhelming force, it is to protect the vast majority of people from murderous fanatics.

So why can't we expect governments to use the tools they possess against the global networks of white supremacy? There's no physical territory involved so this is not about widespread deployment of bombs and guns. But governments should use every legal tool to stamp out and eradicate the whole online infrastructure of "white replacement" ideology that provides the sea in which terrorists like killers in Charleston, Pittsburgh, Oak Creek, and New Zealand swim. And they should be energetic and ruthless.

Oh I know -- at least in the U.S., people have the right to advocate things which others find offensive. But there are limits. We are accumulating a bloody record that shows rightwing racists have been crying fire in a crowded theater of resentments and fears -- and that's not legal speech.

A responsible government would find a way to close these people down before they kill more. Most of them are not blameless citizens (hardly anyone is when the legal eagles get going.) They can be vulnerable to legal constraint if the rest of us want it. We need action.

As Adam Serwer reports:

[in January 2019] the Anti-Defamation League released a report finding that attackers with ties to right-wing extremist movements killed at least 50 people in 2018. That was close to the total number of Americans killed by domestic extremists, meaning that the far right had an almost absolute monopoly on lethal terrorism in the United States last year. That monopoly would be total if, in one case, the perpetrator had not “switched from white supremacist to radical Islamist beliefs prior to committing the murder.”

The number of fatalities is 35 percent higher than the previous year, and it marks the fourth-deadliest year for such attacks since 1970. In fact, according to the ADL, white supremacists are responsible for the majority of such attacks “almost every year.”

Yes, we have our own rightwing troll in White House these days. But he too can be constrained if masses of us want it. It's okay to demand of government that it do its legal job and squash this stuff before it grows further. Back to basics: governments are instituted among humans by the people for the defense of the governed.

Government rebuked over no fly list lawsuit

Rahinah Ibrahim, then a Stanford grad student, now a professor of architecture in her native Malaysia, was placed on a no fly/terrorist watch list in 2004. She was prevented from returning to her studies or even visiting the U.S. Her U.S. citizen daughter was also caught up in the ban. Federal lawyers fought tooth and nail against her lawsuit to challenge her designation.

Until 2014. At that point, an FBI agent told a judge in closed testimony that Ibrahim's exclusion was just a mistake. TechDirt shared some of the heavily redacted transcript:

Agent Kelley misunderstood the directions on the form and erroneously nominated Dr. Ibrahim to the TSA's no-fly list [redacted]. He did not intend to do so. This was a mistake, he admitted at trial. He intended to nominate her to the [very long redaction]. He checked the wrong boxes, filling out the form exactly the opposite way from the instructions on the form. He made this mistake even though the form stated, "It is recommended the subject NOT be entered into the following selected terrorist screening databases."

Oops.

Though the government gave up its defense of its no fly list mistake, Ibrahim remained excluded from the U.S. (possibly because of unproved allegations about her husband) and her attorneys were only partially compensated for the $3.6 million they'd spent preparing this complicated international case. Last Wednesday an appeals court said the government should be ordered to pay up.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in an 8-3 ruling, found that federal lawyers engaged in “scorched earth litigation” for nearly a decade against the former Stanford University graduate student, even though they knew she posed no threat.

“Once the government discovers that its litigation position is baseless, it may not continue to defend it,” Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, a Clinton appointee, wrote for the majority.

...Let's hope this brings us near the completion of this particular panicked government response to the 9/11 terrorists attacks. In the early '00s both politicians and federal spooks were scared stupid that additional horrors might be immanent and defended themselves from responsibility by trampling over vulnerable individuals. I wonder if federal judges confronted with an outright racist president, his thuggish Heimat Security Department, and a neo-Confederate Attorney General (now cast aside), are more alert to abuses that they tolerated for a decade under weak "national security" claims? Perhaps....Full disclosure: Erudite Partner and I were told at the San Francisco airport that we were on the no fly list in 2002. Through the ACLU, we sought disclosure about this secret list in a federal case that dragged on through 2006.

Photo via Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)

Resistance should make immunization central to our culture

So the unpresidential Tangerine has lost a round as federal judges have extended the stay of his Muslim ban. Good. We can now have some confidence that this round will play out over some time period. Any grit in the wheels of his autocratic white nationalist project is a good thing. But let's look ahead a bit. What might we really be up against here?

It looks to me a good bet that much of Trump's snarling at federal judges (and at the media) is designed to give him someone else to blame when the U.S. is hit with some sort of terrorist incident. We will suffer such an attack; in a country that sends its military tromping through nations around the world, a country awash in unregulated guns, and stocked with the usual quantity of damaged people (including the one in the White House), something is going to happen. Our incompetent president and his proto-fascist, white nationalist brain trust led by Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions hope to be able to use popular panic to overthrow constraints on the emerging autocracy.

Our struggle to preserve the rule law will be enhanced by promoting a widespread understanding that when a terror attack occurs 1) something awful and wrong happened; 2) it happened under a president failing to do his job; 3) and terrorism is no excuse for curtailing civil liberties and trying to rule by executive order. Helping as many people as possible to get a grip on that understanding now is what I mean by immunization.

Fortunately, there are people with a big megaphone are out there sounding the alarm. Jack Goldsmith, formerly of George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel, led off with a Lawfare blog post asking a provocative and scary question about Trump's Muslim ban: "Does Trump Want to Lose the Executive Order Battle in Court?"

... the only reason I can think of is that Trump is setting the scene to blame judges after an attack that has any conceivable connection to immigration.  If Trump loses in court he credibly will say to the American people that he tried and failed to create tighter immigration controls.  This will deflect blame for the attack.  And it will also help Trump to enhance his power after the attack.  ...the usual security panic after a bad attack will be enhanced quite a lot—in courts and in Congress—if before the attack legal and judicial constraints are seen to block safety.   If Trump assumes that there will be a bad terrorist attack on his watch, blaming judges now will deflect blame and enhance his power more than usual after the next attack.

This isn't coming from some paranoid lefty -- this is from a conservative Harvard Law professor.

Goldsmith's warning on Monday, February 6, seems to have unleashed a slew of "serious" media voices making similar points.

• Journalist Eric Levitz:

  [Trump's attack on the judge] was not merely an intemperate tweet. It was the president instructing the American people to view the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil as an indictment of the judiciary. ... This is an argument for allowing our fear of terrorism to overwhelm our commitment to the rule of law — a line of reasoning that poses a far greater threat to the American form of government and way of life than any closeted-jihadist refugee ever could.

• Perceptive Democratic Party pundit Ed Kilgore:

  [Trump] is preemptively clearing himself and his administration of any responsibility for future terrorist acts its policies might fail to prevent — or even invite. ... Perhaps the larger challenge is how Trump opponents can safeguard themselves and the country from this sort of irresponsible blame-shifting, which could not only misrepresent the causes for terrorist acts, but justify steps by Trump that endanger our security even more and vitiate civil liberties even further.

• New Republic columnist Jeet Heer:

  If the U.S. is hit by a terrorist attack that can be connected to Islamic radicalism, Trump will blame his opponents, whether they be the courts, politicians, journalists, or whomever; the terrorist attack will be anyone’s fault but his own. Knowing this, Democrats must be ready to play politics in return.

• New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza sought the opinion of George W. Bush's torture-apologist lawyer, John Yoo:

  ... Yoo told me, “If there is another terrorist attack, I could see Trump seeking all of the powers that the President can exercise during wartime. The domestic powers would have to be approved by Congress, such as limitations on habeas, domestic warrantless surveillance, and an internal security act. We really haven’t had a system like that since the Second World War or the Communist cases of the nineteen-fifties.”

• Lizza also interviewed Todd Breasseale, the former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security:

  “We ... wholly believe that Trump needs a bogeyman. But, more importantly, he needs distraction and a blame source. In terrorists, he has his bogeyman. In his control of the prevailing press narrative via tweet, he has distraction. And, in the judiciary, he has a source of blame for why his way was right from the beginning.” Breasseale added, “I am fully confident that an attack is exactly what he wants and needs.”

We, let's call ourselves the Resistance, have a multitude of fights ahead. In all those fights we must holler far and wide that the President is setting the country up to use a terror event to seize greater powers than the constitution allows. That's immunization. I've done my bit. Understanding this has to be a central part of our culture of resistance.

If we do a good job, the inevitable terror attack might well bounce back against Trump. So asserts political scientist Jonathan Bernstein:

It's also possible that some event could inspire a rally-around-the-flag response that could spike his approval ratings. But that's a lot less predictable a reaction than many believe. Large, long-lasting rally effects are rare. And there's no guarantee that Trump would benefit from, say, a terrorist attack, even in the short run. Reactions to such events depend on how the media reports them and how Democrats respond, and neither would necessarily support Trump.

Nor is it certain that the Tweeter-in-Chief would be able to behave himself well enough to get the benefit of the doubt from many who currently think he's doing a bad job. It's not hard to imagine Trump reacting to a foreign-policy or national-security crisis by lashing out at an inappropriate target -- or by getting distracted by some petty unrelated feud.

Let's make sure he is right; we can do this.

Giddy with glee over terror attacks

There's one possible response to the Great Tangerine's (partial, so far) Muslim ban that I think those of us who are furious about this latest violation of national decency should steer clear of.

A NY Times article from Saturday morning exemplifies what I think we must avoid:

The unintended consequence of President Trump’s directive, many experts believe, is that it will make the risk [of terrorist attacks] worse.

... the president’s order appears to address not a rational calculation of risks but the visceral fears that terrorists set out to inflame.

The argument boils down to various more and less measured assertions that a blanket prohibition will thrill the Islamphobic segment of the Trump base, but will hurt "homeland" security.

Folks -- get over it. Weakened security, further inflammatory examples of bigotry and mistreatment of Muslims, are a feature, not a bug, for the Trump administration. Terrorism is wonderful for their plans; we're much more compliant when we are shitting in our pants. They need us scared stupid of imams and other bogeys under our beds.

I never was a "9/11 truther" -- a believer in the conspiracy theory that the GW Bush administration had a role in the attacks on New York and DC. But I was always a "delighter" -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. loved them a good made-for-TV terrorism spectacle. It softened up the country for the mad imperial adventures in the Middle East they had long lusted after.

A few small scale terrorist eruptions in this country that can be blamed on Muslims from anywhere in the world including the US itself would make the current administration giddy with glee. Autocrats love terrorism; when not doing it themselves, they use our panic to shore up their unpopular regimes.

Trump's buddy Vladimir Putin rode to power after apparently using the secret police to blow up apartment buildings and blame Chechen separatists. who he warred against. (The Chechens are some pretty nasty customers in their own right; there are NO virtuous terrorists.)

This gleeful delight in terrorism almost certainly doesn't include all the security spooks who are charged with actually preventing terrorism. Many, even most, are no longer the ignorant bigots they were in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Some still are of course; elements in the FBI, in addition to putting a thumb on the scale for the Great Tangerine against Clinton, harassed random US Muslims in the run up to the November election.

We have to hope that the more responsible spooks in the bureaucracy, and perhaps some inkling that the administration itself might get blamed if they are too obvious about encouraging domestic terrorism, will constrain the Trump administration. The former might be a real obstacle; the latter might prove a weak bulwark if the autocrat feels himself slipping.

Meanwhile, today US airports are engulfed in protest as I write this on Saturday afternoon. A court has issued a partial stay.

We the people are going to have to fix the mess that we the people have made. Resist and protect much.

This is what a terrorist looks like

Edgar Maddison Welch went hunting for imagined demons at a Washington pizza joint. D.C. police politely took the dude into custody. Don't we know he'd be dead if he had dark skin?

Actually, I'm glad the cops didn't come out with their guns blazing -- but let's call the guy what he is: a lone wolf terrorist.

Security and scavengers

Ahmad Khan Rahami's largely aborted bombing spree in New York and New Jersey last week raises again the question of how How Safe are We? John Mueller and Mark Stewart took a look at that question in August. For all the drama and horror of various incidents, they are not impressed by the terrorist threat.

... In general, the capacities of the people involved are singularly unimpressive. A summary assessment by RAND’s Brian Jenkins is apt: “their numbers remain small, their determination limp, and their competence poor.”

Indeed, most of these plots were at best embryonic or facilitated by infiltrating FBI operatives—as in the case of the Rochester panhandler who planned in the name of ISIS to wreak havoc at a local restaurant (where he had been treated with less than full courtesy) with a machete bought for him at Walmart by one of the three FBI operatives who had formed something of a cell around him. Left on their own, it is certainly possible that a few of the plotters would have been able to get their acts together and actually do something. But it seems unlikely that the total damage would increase by anywhere near enough to suggest that terrorism is something that could justifiably be said to present a threat.

In addition to those prosecuted on terrorism charges, authorities have encountered a considerable number of loud-mouthed aspirational terrorists within the United States, and, lacking enough evidence to convict them on terror¬ism charges, the authorities have levied lesser ones to jail or deport them. For the most part, these plots or aspirations are even less likely to lead to notable violence than the ones that have led to terrorism trials. Further, the bulk of people who are jailed on terrorism-associated prosecutions serve short terms and, accordingly, are soon set free to commit terrorism if they want to do so. Yet, none have attempted to do so.

Nor is it likely that much terrorism has been deterred by security measures. Extensive and very costly security measures may have taken some targets—commercial airliners and military bases, for example—off the list for just about all terrorists. However, no dedicated would-be terrorist should have much difficulty finding other potential targets if the goal is to kill people or destroy property to make a statement—the country is filled with these. ...

Mr. Rahami seems to have been one of the incompetent, thank goodness.

I'm staying these days with an elderly friend, a true New Yorker; her reaction was instinctively dismissive of the whole episode. In her mind, New Yorkers don't flinch. Josh Marshall who lives across from where the Chelsea bomb exploded reports a similar sentiment.

... Returning to our neighborhood and approaching the guarded perimeter I felt a deep-seated pride in the community I live in, pride as a New Yorker. Immediately outside the sealed off perimeter people were going about their business as if nothing had happened. There was no climate of fear, no sense of a community on lock down. People were walking the streets, going to restaurants and bars.

Everyone has their own inner dialogue they use to process these events. But I saw no fear or panic. We can't control everything about the dangers we may face in life but we can choose how we live. I'm proud to be part of this city.

New York neighborhood media hit similar notes about how this went down: it's a very New York story.

MANHATTAN — Leave the bomb, take the bag.

In two separate cases, thieves snatching bags from a city street and a train station inadvertently helped law enforcement get the upper hand in a bomb spree that injured dozens of people and spans both sides of the Hudson River, sources said.

The day Ahmad Khan Rahami allegedly planted two bombs in Chelsea — one of which detonated on West 23rd Street — two thieves accidentally helped to disable his second pressure cooker bomb left inside a rolling suitcase on West 27th Street... The young men, who sources described as being well-dressed, opened the bag and took the bomb out, sources said, before placing the explosive into a garbage bag and walking away with the rolling suitcase.

... Then, on Sunday night, two homeless men snatched a backpack resting atop a trash can near a train station in Elizabeth, [NJ] officials said. “They probably thought there was something of value in that backpack,” said the mayor of Elizabeth, Christian Bollwage.

They started rooting through the bag and found five explosives that officials say are tied to Rahami, prompting them to immediately drop the bag in the middle of the street and alert police, officials said.

"When they opened it up and found the wire and the pipe they immediately walked around the other corner to Elizabeth police headquarters and turned it in," Bollwage said.

Worth remembering, next time you see someone checking out your garbage.

Remembering 9/11

Polling on matters about which any opinion most of us have is ungrounded in actual expertise pisses me off. I mean, how many of us really know whether threats from infectious diseases are growing? The half that says "yes" are probably reporting they've seen "news" trumpeting the emergence of the zika virus or ebola. If I were asked, I'd be stumped. I don't know, and I know I don't know.

In the category of dumb polling, Remembering Sept. 11 has produced yet another such example. People were asked whether "the ability of terrorists to launch another major attack on the United States is greater than it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks." Now that's something about which people can have opinions, but those opinions are grounded in damned little information. If you live in Orlando or San Bernardino, you might think you had an inkling. But otherwise, any answer from most of us amounts to our personal guess based on background media noise.

What researchers found is that threat assessments have become a partisan issue: Dems and independents think we are more secure; Republicans are still more likely to be scared stupid.

Pew did exclude "don't know" responses from this graph. I failed to undercover what percentage of all responses that was. I sure hope it was a large quantity as we have almost no informed capacity to answer the question, in the era of secret wars, secret security and secret spooks. ***While I don't put much stock in our ability to assess the ongoing global consequences of the 9/11 attacks and our country's responses -- all bad as far as I can make out -- I found this from the Soufan Group persuasive.

... In the aftermath of the deadliest terror attack [is this true?] in history, the U.S. and its allies laid out several goals and policy responses; chief among the goals was the prevention of another 9/11-scale attack; the denial of terrorist sanctuaries such as Afghanistan; the destruction of al-Qaeda; and countering the violent extremist ideology of bin-Ladinism. As the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, only one of these goals—the prevention of an attack nearing the scale of 9/11—has been met. While the prevention of another such attack is a significant achievement, many of the other post-9/11 concerns are considerably worse now than in 2001.

The U.S. toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan in December 2001 has been followed by nearly fifteen years of efforts to build upon that achievement. Now, the goal has been reduced to simply trying to avoid its reversal. The Taliban no longer holds the seat of central power in Afghanistan, but it does hold more territory now than at any point since September 10, 2001. The U.S. and other countries are frozen in Afghanistan. The coalition has been unable to make sufficient progress in propping up an effective Afghan military and government to allow for the departure of international forces. 

... In Iraq—the invasion of which was tied to 9/11 by the Bush Administration—the situation is equally negative, despite military progress that has been made against the so-called Islamic State. As in Afghanistan, a tactical victory against extremist groups in Iraq bought time for political and social progress that never came to fruition. Like Afghanistan, abysmal governance, economic disaster, foreign meddling, and the persistence of violent extremist messages ensured the return of pervasive terrorism in Iraq. The Islamic State, which rose in various incarnations from the early days of the U.S. invasion, has in some ways surpassed al-Qaeda. The Islamic State’s fortunes in terms of holding territory have begun to wane, but its terror capabilities and the latency of conditions that feed the group’s existence show no sign of subsiding. Similar to the campaign against al-Qaeda, the Islamic State has absorbed significant losses amongst its senior leadership over the last several years without dramatic effect.  ...

Now these authors are selling consulting about preventing terrorism to client governments (a post-9/11 growth industry), so it is not surprising their picture is dire. Still, it seem persuasive here in the land of the uninformed.

Some history to ponder

On March 29, 1973, the last U.S. soldiers left Vietnam. Almost 59,000 U.S soldiers had died; 2.6 million U.S.personnel had served in Vietnam by the time of the withdrawal. More than one million Vietnamese had died in the 17 year long war. The fighting didn't stop for another two years, at which point North Vietnamese forces overran the unpopular South Vietnamese government that the U.S. had propped up. The final fall of Saigon is the source of the famous photo of people trying to board helicopters from the U.S. embassy roof. But by then, our troops had been out for two years.

In those days, when the U.S. "left" one of its imperial experiments, it left. In Vietnam, this was because the other side "won". Ditto Laos and Cambodia.

These days we don't seem to ever get out. Having kicked the hornet's nest, we stay on but pretend the troops we leave in place aren't in combat. A Marine was killed in northern Iraq last week. In January, a U.S. soldier died in Marjah, Helmand province, Afghanistan -- an insignificant place which has suffered from U.S. attention off and on since 1946. Rajiv Chandrasekaran told that story.

ISIS is a plague on the planet. Any responsible government would be trying to eradicate it. The terror of terrorism makes us stupid and mean, as it is intended to. What we need is to be smart and brave. That's hard, but it is the only stance that is going to preserve healthy communities and states.

Oddly, the billionaire George Soros, himself a refugee from Nazi barbarism before he took up crashing currencies for profit, understands this as well as anyone.

Jihadi terrorist groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaida have discovered the achilles heel of our western societies: the fear of death. Through horrific attacks and macabre videos, the publicists of Isis magnify this fear, leading otherwise sensible people in hitherto open societies to abandon their reason.

... Science merely confirms what experience has long shown: when we are afraid for our lives, emotions take hold of our thoughts and actions, and we find it difficult to make rational judgments. Fear activates an older, more primitive part of the brain than that which formulates and sustains the abstract values and principles of open society.

The open society is thus always at risk from the threat posed by our response to fear. A generation that has inherited an open society from its parents will not understand what is required to maintain it until it has been tested and learns to keep fear from corrupting reason. Jihadi terrorism is only the latest example. The fear of nuclear war tested the last generation, and the fear of communism and fascism tested my generation.

... To remove the danger posed by jihadi terrorism, abstract arguments are not enough; we need a strategy for defeating it. ... one idea shines through crystal clear: it is an egregious mistake to do what the terrorists want us to do. ...

We can't fight ISIS by demonizing Muslims or shutting our borders to refugees. The challenge that confronts the generation that Feels the Bern is not only to take our communities back from the plutocrats, but also to demonstrate that it is possible to build a society where people of all colors and all faiths can work together for the common good. That's the true threat to the terrorists -- and also to the plutocrats.