A few minutes before six o’clock on Friday evening, a passenger on board a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris took his suitcase into the bathroom. He emerged armed with an AK-47. There were more than five hundred passengers on board, and the gunman had several clips of ammunition. Mark Moogalian, a French-American academic teaching at the Sorbonne, managed to wrest the rifle from the attacker’s hands. He turned to his wife, and the gunman drew a pistol and shot him in the neck. This awoke another passenger, U.S. Airman Spencer Stone, who followed the gunman down the aisle and tackled him to the ground. The gunman fought back with a box-cutter until Stone’s companions, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler, beat the attacker unconscious. With the help of a fifth man, Chris Norman, a British consultant, they tied the gunman down while Stone tried to keep Moogalian from bleeding to death. “I think he really saved my husband’s life,” Moogalian’s wife later said. According to another passenger, the train’s staff had locked themselves into a separate compartment. On Monday, François Hollande, the French President, awarded Stone, Skarlatos, Sadler, and Norman the Légion d’Honneur. Moogalian, who is still in the hospital, will receive it later, along with an unnamed French banker who also attempted to subdue the gunman.
French prosecutors have charged Ayoub El-Khazzani, a Moroccan national who is alleged to have been the gunman, with terrorism. Multiple governments were aware that El-Khazzani was a potential risk, and Spain had reportedly warned France that he had links to violent extremists and had recently travelled to Syria. French security had his name on a five-thousand-person watch list, the same watch list that contained the names of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, prior to their attack. According to German security services, El-Khazzani flew from Berlin to Istanbul last May, and he could have headed from there toward the Syrian border. Nevertheless, El-Khazzani was sold a first-class train ticket and allowed to board the train in Brussels with an unsearched bag. Khazzani told his lawyer that the motive for the attack was robbery, not terrorism, and that he found the weapons in the park where he spent the night before boarding.
The other passengers had the training, the numbers, and the will to intervene and prevent Khazzani’s attack. But, in addition to applauding their bravery, it’s worth asking how a suspected jihadist known to at least three governments wound up onboard a high-speed train with a suitcase full of weaponry. One answer is that the European Union effectively protected his freedom of movement. France is part of the Schengen Area, which stretches from Portugal to Finland (and eastward to Greece), where E.U. citizens can usually travel without submitting to passport checks. The tens of thousands of asylum seekers who travel through Europe and the threat of terrorism have made Schengen’s openness more controversial. Compared to the United States, Europe has a larger population of potentially violent jihadists and less centralized authority with which to monitor them. After Friday’s shooting, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel proposed that the borderless Schengen regime would have to change. “We have to be ready to sacrifice certain freedoms in the interest of fighting terrorism,” he said. However, on Monday, President Hollande suggested that preventing terrorism is ultimately the responsibility of individuals as much as the state, “men and women capable of doing the right thing under the right circumstances.” This echoed Hollande’s statements after the Charlie Hebdo attack, which emphasized solidarity and the defense of French values more than heightened security measures.
It’s hard to imagine an American politician positing that individual citizens ultimately are responsible for thwarting terrorist attacks. We are proud individualists when it comes to economic matters, but we refuse to tolerate any risk to our security. After 9/11, this manifested itself as what journalist Ron Suskind described as “the One Percent doctrine” or the “Cheney doctrine,” the notion that even a very slight chance of catastrophe must be treated “as a certainty,” and preëmpted. Regarding evidence, Suskind wrote in 2007, “the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn’t apply. If there was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction—and there has been a small probability of such an occurence for some time—the United States must now act as if it were a certainty. This was a mandate of extraordinary breadth.”
Politicians have found different ways to describe their adherence to this doctrine. The standard line is not that we are choosing security over civil liberties but rather that we are engaging in technocratic “balancing.” “With liberty and security, it’s not that the more you have of one, the less you have of the other,” Hillary Clinton writes in her new memoir. “In fact I believe they make each other possible.” This echoes White House statements about the “balance between security and liberty,” although President Obama has at times come close to acknowledging that prioritizing security requires some invasive and pre-emptive measures. “You can’t have one hundred percent security and also have one hundred percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” Obama said in an unscripted Q. & A., shortly after Edward Snowden’s first disclosures. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.” This, of course, is apparent to anyone who has walked barefoot through a millimetre-wave scanner.
When it comes to government, the relationship between security and freedom isn’t a balancing act. It’s a tug-of-war. Every inch obtained by one side must be given up by the other. “You can’t enjoy your civil liberties if you’re in a coffin,” New Jersey governor Chris Christie said in May, arguing in his typically blunt way that the government should have more counterterrorism powers.
The government can spy on those it deems likely to become terrorists, roll up their networks afterwards, or use provocateurs to push credulous suspects into committing a crime. What it can’t do is cover every watch-listed suspect and every soft target twenty-four hours a day. It’s hard to imagine a law that would let the government eliminate the last one per cent of risk. “We’ve been lucky,” an intelligence source recently told a French newspaper. “We’ve already tried everything. But we’ve reached the very limits of what we are able to do.” Beyond that limit, counterterrorism falls to those who happen to be nearby, whether any sheepdogs are present to hold off the lone wolf.
