Vehicle Ramming Attacks in Public Spaces: Isn't Anyone Serious About Defense?

I don't wish to be too hard on the authorities in Magdeburg, Germany, and their costly durcheinanderbringen that left their Christmas market vulnerable to a vehicle ramming attack last month. Our own authorities in New Orleans did exactly the same stupid thing, and that one cost ten lives. The photo above is of the aftermath on Bourbon Street.  

There is quite the cultural difference between central Germany and New Orleans, of course. For instance, what German city would ever adopt the motto "Let the Good Times Roll?" It's easier for me to understand a huge security screw-up in New Orleans. 

"New Orleans resembles Genoa or Marseilles, or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria more than it does New York, although all seaports resemble one another more than they can resemble any place in the interior. Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico form a homogeneous, though interrupted, sea." A. J. Liebling, THE EARL OF LOUISIANA

Did you ever read Confederacy of Dunces? That above quote is from the foreword. Totally true. New Orleans is the only place in North America - which includes Mexico, don't forget - where I've ever felt I needed a visa. 

A news report on yesterday's New Orleans attack is here: 

A set of security barriers that were installed in 2017 to prevent terrorist attacks along Bourbon Street were being replaced when a driver barreled down the city’s most famous thoroughfare hours into the New Year on Wednesday, killing 10 and injuring dozens. 

The removable stainless-steel bollards are designed to be securely locked at each crosswalk along Bourbon Street between Canal and St. Ann streets, according to Mayor LaToya Cantrell's administration. The attack occurred near the intersection of Bourbon and Iberville streets. 

New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said the suspect drove “at a very fast pace” down Bourbon Street about 3:15 a.m., striking dozens, and then shot at first responders after crashing. Two officers were struck and are in stable condition. The suspect, too, was shot and has died. The FBI is investigating the incident as a terrorist attack. 

The bollard project began in November and was scheduled to last three months. It involves removing and replacing sections of road to take out the existing bollards. A city press release on Tuesday night noted the project was ongoing, but did not provide details of work done thus far.

The old barriers never worked too well, said Bob Simms, who until recently oversaw security initiatives for the French Quarter Management District. 

'They were very ineffective. The track was always full of crap; beads and doubloons and God knows what else. Not the best idea,” Simms said. “Eventually everybody realized the need to replace them. They’re in the process of doing that, but the new ones are not yet operational.” 

Simms said the old barrier at the crosswalk of Canal and Bourbon streets was removed a few weeks ago. Equipment for a replacement is in place, he said. 

"They're doing it in time for the Super Bowl," Simms said. "It's ironic in a way." 

-- snip -- 

Simms said preventing the kind of carnage that took place early Wednesday was "exactly what [the bollards were] built for." 

The bollards were put in place before NBA All-Star Game in 2017. The plan was partly a reaction to the July 2016 mass murder in Nice, France, when a terrorist used a truck as a weapon to plow into a Bastille Day crowd, killing 86 and injuring hundreds more. A few months later a copycat killed 12 shoppers in a Berlin Christmas market. 

That's a major screw-up in any language. 

The still-fairly-serious press is now paying attention, and today the NYT has an article about the rising threat of vehicle ramming attacks, and it's NOT barricaded behind a paywall, so they must really want you to read it. 

You'll find there links to an FBI handout and also a British academic journal article from 2019, both about the spectacularly obvious tactic of vehicle ramming. In short, ramming attacks have left a death toll that exceeds that of almost any vehicle bomb attack. 

The NYT article ends with these two last paragraphs:

“The problem in the most recent case [in Germany] is that the perpetrator used a lane reserved for ambulances,” said Nicolas Stockhammer, a professor of security studies at Danube University in Krems, Austria. “He approached the area through a side where there was no protection.”

The city of New Orleans was upgrading security bollards along a section of Bourbon Street in the area where the attack occurred, according to its website. The city’s police superintendent said at a news conference that the perpetrator “went around our barricades” to conduct the attack.

So, it appears that our best intellectual talent in security studies and our foremost municipal police leaderships are capable of appreciating the threat of vehicle ramming attacks. 

That's good. But the NYT ends the matter there. It doesn't take the next step and ask our responsible officials why those attacks have been succeeding. 

The answer to that question is BECAUSE YOU DID'NT BLOCK VEHICLE ACCESS TO YOUR CITIES' MOST ATTRACTIVE TARGETS, that's why. You left gaps open and unprotected which the attackers could exploit. 

Are you not as serious about defense as your attackers are about offense? 

It's all the more aggravating that our responsible officials already know how to counter those attacks, since they know our federal government has done just that for decades around its domestic and overseas buildings. They know better but they did a half-assed job anyway. 

Maybe we citizens and voters might now ask those responsible officials why they have been derelict in their basic duty of public safety. 

German Chancellor Vows to Leave No Merkelstein Unturned

It’s beginning to look a lot like elections 

Voters a bit subnormal, 

Saying Olaf, Was zum Teufel?, it’s hard to be real joyful

When vehicle barriers aren’t so uniformal 

It’s beginning to look a lot like elections 

Politics are all amoral, 

But the prettiest sight to see is the scapegoat that might be

Nailed to your own front door 

A bit of news today on that Christmas market attack and the inevitable search for the officials who dropped the ball by allowing a big, obvious, vulnerable gap in the market's anti-ram perimeter. Read it here: 

German security and intelligence chiefs faced questioning Monday about the car-ramming attack that killed five people and wounded more than 200 at a Christmas market 10 days ago. 

They were to be quizzed about possible missed clues and security failures before the December 20 attack in the eastern city of Magdeburg, where police arrested a Saudi psychiatrist, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, at the scene. 

-- snip -- 

Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who faces a general election in February, has declared that Germany needs to "investigate whether this terrible act could have been prevented".

"No stone must be left unturned," he told news portal T-online on Friday. 

No stone? As in no Merklestein? Precisely, Herr Chancellor! 

A gap left in an otherwise continuous perimeter of anti-ram barriers was exactly what allowed that ramming attack to happen at the Magdelburg Christmas market. 

Someone was careless, and I suspect you have already expended some typical German efficiency in lining up a few likely suspects, probably low-ranking and expendable ones. 

All’s that left is to hang him or them out to dry before those general elections. 

Wrongfully Detained, But No Longer Biden's Problem

The friends and family of Marc Fogel, the U.S. citizen and teacher who was arrested in Moscow on drug charges back in 2021, have been making a public pitch for him to be designated as wrongfully detained under the Robert Levinson Act, but that had seemed to go nowhere. In all frankness, the guy was simply guilty as charged and caught red-handed. I posted much more on that at the time he was convicted: see this. 

However, something seems to have moved the Biden Administration to designate him anyway, and after all this time, just three weeks before they leave office. What motivated that, I wonder? 

A few good news media quotes here: 

An American schoolteacher arrested in Russia on drug charges more than four years ago has been designated by the U.S. government as wrongfully detained, the State Department said Friday.

“The United States has been working to secure Marc Fogel’s release for some time. We have long called for his humanitarian release and tried to include him in the August 1 deal, but were unable to. The Secretary determined Marc is wrongfully detained in October," the department said in a statement.

The designation traditionally shifts supervision of a detainee's case to the office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, a State Department office focused on negotiating for the release of hostages and other Americans classified as being wrongfully detained in other countries.

-- snip --

The State Department considers a range of factors in deciding whether to designate an American jailed in a foreign country as wrongfully detained, including if there's credible information that the person is innocent. The factors also include if they are being held for the primary purpose of influencing U.S. policy or securing concessions from the U.S. government.

Officials confirmed Friday that Fogel had now received that designation.

So, which consideration is it that moves the Biden Admin to act now? Does it think Fogel is innocent? Or does it think he's being used to either influence U.S. policy or to secure concessions from the USG? Those seem to be the only considerations that would make the Robert Levinson Act apply.  

I can't imagine which it is because they are all equally absurd. He's plainly guilty on the charge of smuggling weed, and he is not the kind of important character whom the Russians would try to barter for in policy or other concessions. 

It would not be disparaging to him if we consider Mr. Fogel to be a routine consular case of a citizen imprisoned abroad. Push for humanitarian parole from his 14-year sentence, but that's all. 

Why in the world should we give his family false hopes of a negotiated release now? 

 

Magdeburg Christmas Market Mass Killing: Where Were the Merklesteins?

“Bollards [vehicle barriers] had been put up to protect the area but one local politician noted that they did not extend all the way around the perimeter, with a gap left for a tram line.” https://t.co/TbylitLURl

— TSB (@TweetingTSB) December 21, 2024

"Merklesteins," or Merkle stones, is the name the German press gave to the vehicle barriers that appeared around Christmas markets after a vehicle attack was committed at the Berlin market in 2016.

For a couple years after that I did annual posts on the increasingly efficient and often aesthetic Merklesteins that went up in German cities and elsewhere. See this one, for instance, or click on the Merklestein tab below. 

Those barriers had gotten pretty good, and they ought to have precluded more vehicle attacks. So I was highly interested in how the attacker yesterday was able to drive into the Magdeburg market seemingly with no problem.

The answer is in today's UK and German news: it was because the Magdeburg city authorities left a gap in the market's anti-ram barrier perimeter that the attacker could exploit. 

From today's:The Telegraph:

Local authorities in Magdeburg are giving a press conference. The main theme has been how the killer was able to drive his car past a security perimeter.

A police official said that the killer exploited the fact that gaps had been left in the perimeter to allow for ambulances to get in and out.

City officials have said that gaps between bollards were there as an escape route for emergency services but that they were guarded by the police.

“I think our security concept is good because it was coordinated,” said Ronni Krug, a spokesperson for the city hall.

“The case we are now discussing here is one that we could not have anticipated in terms of its dimensions and that perhaps could not have been prevented.”

Questions had been raised after the attack about why there were such big gaps between bollards at entrances to the Christmas market.

That the gaps "were guarded by police" presumably means that one or two officers stood next to them and maybe waived high visibility 'stop' signs. Evidently it does not mean that the gaps were covered by active anti-ram barriers that police could lower in the event that an emergency vehicle needed access but which would otherwise remain up. 

I find it appalling that city hall spokesman Ronni Krug would say that yesterday's attack could not have been anticipated or prevented. All European nations have security and anti-terrorism professionals who could have seen that perimeter vulnerability and would indeed have anticipated that attack. After all, the attacker saw and did just that.  

Not to be too hard on spokesman Krug, but he exemplifies the naïve mindset of the instinctively law-abiding citizen and Bürgermeister. The mindset of yesterday's attacker will perpetually be a mystery to them. 

That's a problem because someone who does not share at least some of the mindset of his adversaries is simply out of place doing vulnerability assessments. Yesterday's attacker could have told spokesman Krug and the rest of the crowd at city hall that their security concept was really no good at all if they wanted to stop vehicle ramming attacks. 

City hall - and not just the one in Magdeburg - is paying the price for not employing someone who will look at potential targets from their would-be attacker's point of view. 

   

Hillary is Guilty (193 Classified Emails According to DOJ), Stop Pretending Otherwise

This is so tiring. Just read the DOJ’s report: https://t.co/dKIgotXZPW https://t.co/sBvAkoM9tx

— TSB (@TweetingTSB) December 9, 2024

And she got away with it scot-free. Isn't that enough? 

Now stop the whining and just hope that FBI Director Patel will be too busy elsewhere to look into that cold case.

 

The Bureau Meets Bollywood (Or, There's a New Sherif in Town)

 

This is exactly how I imagine Kash Patel's first day as Director of the FBI will go.

J. Edgar Hoover eat your heart out! This new era will have more flamboyant costumes and sizzling romance than even you could have imagined.   

Massive Deportation: "Action on Day One" and Step-By-Step

This version of shock-and-awe might work a lot better on illegal aliens persons not lawfully present in the U.S. than it did on Iraqis thirty-three years ago.

The Mail on Sunday has a terrific piece of reporting (here) that I don't see elsewhere in the news.  

The Mail on Sunday has spoken to those in Trump's inner circle who say his immigration plans have been top of the list in discussions held at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home, in the days since his crushing victory. 

One lawyer familiar with the talks told me: 'Donald is preparing for a series of moves against illegal immigrants, which he says will cause 'shock and awe'. Kicking out illegals was the mainstay of his run for the White House and he knows people expect action on Day One. They will get it.' 

- snip -

'Step One' of the deportation programme is to target undocumented immigrants with ties to criminal gangs. It is dubbed 'Operation Aurora', after the Colorado town where members of the ruthless Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua turned apartment complexes into bases for drug dealing and prostitution. 

- snip -

'Step Two' is to expel more than one million people whose applications to remain in the US have been denied and who are on the deportation list. Then the round-up of the millions of remaining illegal immigrants will begin as part of 'Step Three'. Places of work, including farms and meatpacking plants, will be subject to raids (or 'targeted enforcement activities') – something the American Civil Liberties Union calls 'vile, unconstitutional and un-American'. 

- snip -

Trump is said to be planning to merge ICE and Border Patrol – the federal law enforcement agency – into one 'uber' organisation of 88,000 people and will release millions in central funding to add 40,000 new agents and 8,000 extra immigration court judges to expedite expulsions. 

- snip -

Intriguingly, Trump is exploring paying 'third-party safe countries' to take non-violent applicants while their visas are being processed. The scheme is similar to Rishi Sunak's now abandoned Rwanda plan, in which migrants who crossed the Channel illegally were to be flown to Rwanda to seek asylum there instead.

That last part is particularly intriguing to Brits, since their own government chickened out on the same plan a while ago. 

So The Trumpening will go eyeball to eyeball with the ACLU and cheap labor lobby governors early next year, and we'll see who blinks first.