Appearing on Monday’s Now with Alex Wagner, former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert pointed out the obvious: U.S. national security cannot stop every terror attack.
"What are you going to do? Are you going to follow everybody?" Herbert asked.
"Are you going to violate all kinds of laws having to do with civil liberties? I think that you have to at some point accept even though it's difficult and this is a horrendous tragedy, you have to accept that in a free society, which ours still is, you cannot stop every terror attack," he said.
However, no one is arguing that law enforcement should "follow everybody" or "violate all kinds of laws." What lawmakers such as Peter King are suggesting is targeted surveillance of Muslim communities and intelligence operations to prevent attacks. NYPD has taken these steps and has prevented more than a dozen plots on New York City since 9/11. We might want to have known, for example, about "Misha" and the Islamic community in Rhode Island (!) before Tamerlan and Dzhokhar murdered an eight-year-old boy, and three others. Aggressive policing doesn't break the law. It protects it.
