The 400 New Orleans police officers on duty in the French Quarter were not able to stop the New Year’s Eve ramming attack with a pickup truck used to run down revelers on Bourbon St., nor should those cops have been expected to, even as three of those officers heroically shot dead the killer when he opened fire.
It is the FBI that is America’s counterterror force and now leads the investigation into the atrocity, which has killed more than a dozen, with many more wounded.
It is imperative that the FBI has to maintain its professionalism and its expertise to protect the country — and Donald Trump’s choice of the unfit and dangerous Kash Patel must not become the bureau’s next director. Trump and the U.S. Senate should listen to William Webster, the only man to serve as both the FBI director and the CIA director, and not install Patel.
From the high-profile target of a packed Bourbon Street on New Year’s Eve to the black ISIS flag planted on the back of the pickup to the possible improvised explosive devices, this has all the indications of being a terror attack, like the Boston Marathon bombing or the several plots against New York.
Local police are not trained for such threats, as we saw with the use of a New Orleans police car as a roadway barrier onto Bourbon Street to temporarily replace the normal bollards, which were being replaced in time for the Super Bowl next month. But the assailant, identified as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, didn’t wait until February’s Super Bowl or March’s Mardi Gras. He just drove his Ford F-150 weapon up on the sidewalk to bypass the cop car. He only stopped when he crashed the pickup into a large crane.