Here is an article form on of my favorite blogs, Slate. He speaks to how there were no more terrorist attacks in America is more likely because of better surveillance and good police teamwork. some of his views I agree with while others I don't.
what I agree with:
An attack is years or months in the making.
The greatest blow to al-Qaida has come from the removal of its haven in Afghanistan and the disruption of the permissive environment it enjoyed in numerous countries.
what I don't agree with:
This shift from a centralized structure to a more localized one has made the U.S. homeland safer.
While I defiantly feel that Afghanistan was a major blow along with civilians not being as hospitable (including criminals who might have helped for a price), we are not safer because al-Qaida is decentralized. It is just a different form of a dangerous creature. These cells can act upon there own without a hold back call from a central figure, of which makes them more self contained and just as dangerous as the whole.
Anyway, here is a piece of the article for archiving. Click on the link provided for more about the story.
SOURCE: SLATE Magazine
Safer Than You Think
The security we've enjoyed since Sept. 11 isn't just a matter of dumb luck.
By Dan Byman
Posted Monday, Aug. 2, 2004, at 1:25 PM PT
Citing "new and unusually specific information" that merited a 10 on a 1-to-10 scale of reliability, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has issued a warning that al-Qaida has plans to attack several major financial targets in New York City and Washington, D.C., and raised the terror alert level in those areas to Code Orange. While ominous, such warnings are not new, and workers in targeted institutions were said to be "defiant" in the face of the heightened alert. After all, since the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, pundits and policymakers have warned that additional spectacular terrorist attacks on the United States were inevitable.
I have long been part of this pack of doomsayers. My reasoning was simple. Well before Sept. 11, al-Qaida had brutally demonstrated both its desire to kill Americans and its ability to do so. If anything, the carnage of Sept. 11 bolstered the organization's desire to kill large numbers of Americans. Al-Qaida had captured the world's attention, brought the war home to America, and inflicted considerable economic damage to boot. If this was not incentive enough, the ousting of al-Qaida's patron the Taliban, the arrest or death of many senior leaders at the hands of U.S. forces, and the worldwide hounding of al-Qaida operatives should have redoubled its determination to strike back. Indeed, a bloody al-Qaida response would have met with considerable applause in much of the Muslim world angered by the U.S. war against and occupation of Iraq.
For these reasons, I still believe an attack is likely in the years, perhaps even months, to come. And if the flight attendants and passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 63 had been a little less alert (or if Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," had been a little less stupid), more Americans would be dead. But almost three years without an al-Qaida attack in the United States must be taken as a sign of progress, even if it is only a hiatus between Sept. 11 and another major strike. What explains this unexpected success?
The easy answer, and the wrong one, is that U.S. officials exaggerated the al-Qaida threat. By this reckoning, the Sept. 11 attacks were the devastating last gasp of a now-battered movement. Such an argument, however, ignores the fact that al-Qaida and organizations affiliated with it have become more active internationally since Sept. 11. Although the United States has, fortunately, been spared, the group or organizations linked to it have attacked in Tunisia, Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Kenya, Jordan, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, and Spain, among others lands—to say nothing of Iraq.
Another specious argument is that the terrorists have migrated to Iraq and decided to confront America there rather than on U.S. soil. Iraq, of course, is a magnet for jihadists opposed to the United States, some of whom are linked to al-Qaida. Yet despite their zeal for killing Americans (and cooperative Iraqis) in Iraq, this has not stopped them from carrying out lethal attacks in Russia and Western Europe, among other places....
For more of the article, click on the link provided...