AND NOW BELGIUM – AT 11:46 A.M. ET:  Another chilling report on thwarted terror attacks.  This comes but a few days after a major terror attack was broken up in Australia, and the Australians increased security around their parliament in light of new warnings.  From AFP: 

The Belgian authorities have prevented several attacks by jihadist fighters returning home from Syria and by sympathizers with the Islamic State extremist group, a report said Saturday.

The daily L’Echo cited unnamed sources as saying the planned attacks could have been similar to the one on the Jewish Museum in central Brussels in May which left four people dead.

The suspect in that case, Frenchman Medhi Nemmouche, spent more than a year fighting with Islamist extremists in Syria and is now being held in Belgium on charges of “murder in a terrorist context”.

Up to 400 Belgian nationals are estimated to have gone to fight in Syria, with about 90 known to have returned home, L’Echo said.

“Our starting point is that among them, one out of nine aim to carry out an attack,” a source said. “That is a conservative estimate, if you also take into account the people who help them.”

The newspaper said its sources did not want to give details of the planned attacks nor of the operations to prevent them, for reasons of security and so as not to alarm the public.

Several arrests have been made, it added.

Officials declined to provide any details but did confirm that several operations had been carried out.

“We are working full time on the problem of the returning fighters,” Belga news agency cited a federal judicial spokesman as saying.

COMMENT:  It's only a matter of time before someone, or some group, gets through.  And, as we saw with the Boston Marathon bombing, it can happen here.

Remember that the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, to change the psychological condition of a people.  Some disparage terrorism on the ground that an individual attack often kills only a small number of people.  But an attack can terrorize and disrupt an entire city or country.  The bringing down of one airliner can terrorize the entire international air system.  A coordinated series of attacks on commuter buses in the United States on one day will terrorize every bus passenger in America. 

September 20, 2014