... and another bomb exploded at a underground metro station aboard a train. Terrible. This is probably retaliation for the capture of the person who organized the Paris attacks 4 months ago. France 24 aka F24 is carried on many cable networks and rebroadcast by ota PBS stations. I discovered another news source in Europe in EuActiv -- http://www.euractiv.com/ -- supplying video to other broadcast services. These outlets are focusing on the terrorism story while the USA media is pandering to Obama's Cuban trip nonsense.
On the contrary, the news media this morning has been full of the terrorist attacks. It has been on all morning. Obama was on the news briefly for about 10 minutes when he gave a response to address the attacks from Cuba. They also covered Trumps irrelevant and inane response to the attacks as to "what he would do." Basically, he just gave the spiel he gives on the campaign about being tough on terrorists..and how he is number one in the polls, blah, blah, blah. Yeah he is a "winner" we get it.
Kgord, apparently you were watching different channels than I or perhaps were watching at a different time. F24 and RT, in my opinion, had the better ongoing coverage without the clutter of US politics when I wrote the OP. Regardless, I agree with your opinion on feckless POTUS' "we are with you" statement.
I feel so heartbroken for all those innocent people who lost their lives in this tragedy. It never ends
In the UK the channels have it on non-stop with live updates. Sadly it was not a surprise and just shows that intelligence is weak and resources are too. Tragic but not unexpected, and given the recent arrest of a Paris suspect Belgium should have been more prepared. Another reason why the EU borders don't work when they are open.
I would throw out a guess that this wasn't exactly retaliation but more to do with the terrorists getting scared that Salah Abdeslam dude would give up information. As we have seen before, the terrorists tend to die while carrying out their attacks. And if not then they would get killed when the police come looking for them. This guy was different, he chose to run instead of dying and I bet the other terrorists linked to him saw that as a huge threat. "If he ran instead of fighting, what is to say that he won't tell them something?" It's obvious that attacks like these were prepared for quite some time but this could have been simply "ohh shit they might be onto us, better go boom now" kind of thing. The fact that one of the bombs didn't even explode and that other bombs were found in the subsequent searches during the same day kind of points to the fact that this attack didn't really go as well as it could have.
There is an element of retaliation here. Terrorists operate sleeper cells in different countries in the world as they plan their operations covertly to avoid detection. I think the arrest of one of the Paris bombers activated this Belgian sleeper cell. It is important to note that there is no perfect defense against terrorism. No matter the quality of surveillance, a few cases are assured to slip through the dragnet.
This was probably timed for the Easter break. Here in Europe it's a big holiday unlike the US. Children have 3 weeks off school and there is a long weekend coming up as people take a few days off before Easter and after Easter to maximize their holiday entitlement. These types of incidents will always be hard to prevent, especially public transport, airports, bus stations and the like. Extra police presence as a deterrent can help, but when there are limited resources it's hard to cover. Having worked at Heathrow there were always armed police and security patrolling each terminal and they made their presence known.
After a terrorist attack there always are people talking about prevention of attacks, intelligence, etc, etc but the slew of terrorist attacks shows that it's time security agencies came up with better strategies to stop terrorism because if they are relying on old strategies [to fight terrorism] terrorists will be one step ahead most of the time.
Thanks for sharing, I have heard of this but not the hole story. It's a shame that this is happening to innocent people, first we had Paris and now this country... Heartbreaking. I really hope that this stops.
