The “War on Terror” After Snowden

CHAPTER 29 The “War on Terror” After Snowden Because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that make our ability collectively, internation- ally, to find these terrorists much more challenging. —CIA DIRECTOR JOHN BRENNAN, in response to the Paris terrorist attack, November 2015 Ox THE EVENING of November 13, 2015, nine jihadist terror- ists acting on behalf of ISIS brought normal life in Paris to a screeching halt. Three suicide bombers blew themselves up at the stadium at Saint-Denis while President Hollande was inside attend- ing a match between France and Germany. Other terrorists that night killed 130 people at cafés, restaurants, and a theater. Three hundred and eighty-eight others were wounded in the carnage. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a twenty-cight-year-old Belgian citizen of Moroccan origins who served ISIS as a logistics officer in Syria in 2014, planned the attack over many months with the help of others in Syria. To organize it, they smuggled three suicide bombers into Europe through Greece, raised financing, set up a base in the Molen- beek section of Brussels, imported deactivated assault weapons from Slovenia that were restored by a technician, bought ammunition, acquired suicide vests, obtained “burner” cell phones, rented cars, and, two months before the attack, rented three additional apart- ments under fake identities to conceal the operation. Finally, in | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 291 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019779