Free Intel Wars by Matthew M. Aid Page B

information needed to prevent another 9/11.” NCTC’s management chose not to act on the complaints, however, with the analyst recalling that “we were still waiting for a reply to our complaint when I left a year later.”
    Senior officials at the NCTC can rightfully point to some major successes in the war on terror since 9/11. The killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, tops everyone’s list of major accomplishments, but the NCTC’s analysts are still waiting to see if his death will lead to the collapse of what is left of al Qaeda in Pakistan. In the meantime, there have been other successes against al Qaeda. Not only has there been a marked decrease in the number of terrorist attacks around the world, but al Qaeda has been unable to mount a successful terrorist attack inside the U.S. for the past decade. Whether this is because of the efforts of the intelligence community or the weakened state of al Qaeda is a matter of fierce debate within the intelligence community today.
    There have been occasional attempts, but these plots have all failed miserably, largely because of a combination of technical problems and the ineptitude of the individuals chosen to mount the attacks. Take for example the case of the mentally unstable British-born al Qaeda operative named Richard Reid, who on December 22, 2001, attempted to detonate high explosives packed into his shoes over the Atlantic while on a United Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. The bomb failed to detonate, and Reid was overpowered by the plane’s passengers and crew. He is now serving a life sentence in federal prison.
    Over the past decade the U.S. intelligence community and its foreign partners have largely succeeded in either destroying or neutralizing the majority of al Qaeda’s terrorist networks outside of the organization’s stronghold in northern Pakistan. The European intelligence and security services, with some assistance from the U.S. intelligence community, have largely succeeded in stripping bare most of al Qaeda’s operational and logistical support networks in Western Europe. European counterterrorism officials believe that today there are only a handful of al Qaeda operatives remaining in Western Europe. Even so, while their numbers are greatly diminished, the remaining al Qaeda operatives in Europe remain potentially lethal.
    The Middle East may be the secret success story of the U.S. counterterrorism effort since the Obama administration entered office in 2009. Iran and Syria, the two Middle Eastern countries who are the leading state sponsors of terrorism, have been largely quiescent over the past three years in terms of actively supporting terrorist attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. Both countries continue to provide sanctuary and financial support to a number of Middle East terrorist groups, but these groups have largely written terrorism out of their playbooks in their efforts to become legitimate political forces in their home countries.
    For example, there have been almost no major terrorist attacks on Israel since the Obama administration entered office because the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is now fully occupied trying to govern the Gaza Strip. There have also been no significant terrorist attacks inside Lebanon over the past three years because the Iranian- and Syrian-backed militant group Hezbollah has largely abandoned terrorism in favor of becoming a legitimate political party in Lebanon. Today, Hezbollah is the single most powerful political force in Lebanese politics, holding eleven of the thirty cabinet posts in the Lebanese government until withdrawing from the Lebanese government in early 2011. It still holds a substantial bloc of delegates in the Lebanese parliament. And thanks to substantial financial subsidies from Iran (estimated at $300 million per annum), it largely governs those parts of southern Lebanon where the country’s Shiite population resides