Christopher Dickey writes: Police have released the photo of a 28-year-old man originally from Afghanistan, Ahmad Khan Rahami, being sought for questioning in connection with the bombing in New York City on Saturday night. [The suspect has now been arrested.]

According to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, talking to CNN, Rahami should be regarded as “armed and dangerous.”

“Things are moving very quickly,” De Blasio said, but he would not confirm that Rahami was part of an operating cell or that it had connection with jihadists overseas, including al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State.
What to make of all this?

“Terrorists are now doing what we had long expected them to do and wondered why they didn’t do,” former acting CIA director John McLaughlin told an audience in New York last week. “They are going for soft targets.”

He was talking about attacks in Europe.

This week, he could say the same thing — exactly the same thing — about the United States.

It appears all but certain to counterterrorist officials in Europe and the United States that the long-anticipated jihadist strategy of random terror carried out with such devastating social and political consequences in France and Germany over the last year has now begun in America.

The implications in this deeply troubled election year, right as the United Nations General Assembly is convening in New York City, are enormous. [Continue reading…]