U.S., India Warned Sri Lanka Weeks Before Easter Terror Attacks

[oldsoftie]

Source: WSJ

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka—U.S. and Indian security services warned the Sri Lankan government of a planned attack weeks before a devastating series of bombings killed at least 290 people at churches and tourist hotels on Easter Sunday.

Sri Lanka government officials said some of the suicide bombers and others arrested were linked to an obscure radical Islamist group known as National Thowheeth Jamath, a group the government singled out to police for monitoring as a possible threat after the foreign security services issued their warning.

The sophistication of the Easter-morning attacks indicated to Sri Lankan and international terror experts that whoever carried them out likely had help from experienced international terrorists, perhaps even al Qaeda or Islamic State, Sri Lankan officials said.

“We have found that NTJ was involved in the attacks,” said Rajitha Senaratne, a government spokesman and the country’s health commissioner, using an abbreviation for what he called “a local organization.”

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/sri-lanka-makes-arrests-in-easter-bombing-attacks-11555918580

[Igel]

1. It's not the fact of the warning that matters.

It's the details that matter.

For all the ranting about 9/11, you look back and actually put yourself in a briefing room on 9/1/11 with the information that we know was available now and you *still* can't draw a direct line between that information and what happened. Hindsight doesn't help. The attack is so underspecified that you could have defended 200,000 different sites against the 6 most likely modalities for attack, and still have would have no effect on the outcome unless you were just damned lucky.

Of course, doing that as early as the threat was known would have unleashed a firestorm of protests. If information about the details leaked, it's likely sources would have been compromised and maybe things would have changed--or maybe the sources would just have dried up, so there's have been less (useless) information.

In other words, claims made in outrage in order to blame somebody for not doing something need to be held until what was known is fully known (as possible), and then judgment made as to how likely that information would have been able to produce plausible steps that would have actually stopped the attacks.

It's like somebody who allegedly said in summer 2001 that we needed to go to a "war footing." In early 9/01, had Bush II wanted to go to a war footing there'd have been such resistance it would have been mind blowing. For many, the stealer of the 2010 election was already a petty Hitler hell-bent on seizing absolute power.

[oldsoftie]

2. You are absolutely right.

I remember seeing a story in the late 90s about terrorists wanting to fly planes into buildings & thinking "Ha! That'll never happen". Instead of saying "Nobody saw this coming" Bush shouldve said "nobody believed this could be done"

[watoos]

3. The warnings that Clinton and Bush had,

didn't come from a super market tabloid. There was intelligence that al-Qaeda planned to fly planes into buildings, that is much different than seeing a story in the Enquirer.