Bob McManus

Bob McManus

Opinion

Fleet Week visitor could teach the NYPD a lesson

A battered veteran of terrorism’s War on America will be stopping by New York City over the Memorial Day weekend.

Armed to the teeth.

USS Cole, the guided-missile destroyer nearly sunk by Islamist suicide bombers in Aden harbor in the fall of 2000, is set to join the parade of ships in May as New York City celebrates Fleet Week ’14 — a most fitting and welcome visitor.

Thousands will line the harbor as Cole slips by the Statue of Liberty. Small boats by the score will be bobbing in the channel, too, with helicopters — military and media — suspended overhead.

All in all, a magnificent sight.

But all along Cole’s deck, and from her bridge wings, sailors will be studying the spectators, too — over the sights of loaded machine guns.

For there will be no uncontested repeat of Cole’s agony — here or anywhere else — if its young gunners can help it.

This ominous practice is now routine as US warships enter and leave port; it was born of sad necessity — Cole herself being a stark example of what can happen when the security curtain slips in an age of suicidal terrorism.

Seventeen sailors died on Oct. 21, 2000, when a bomb-laden harbor launch slammed into Cole’s port side and exploded as the ship refueled in the Yemeni port.

At the time, the attack was seen as of a piece with other small-bore assaults on US interests in Africa and the Middle East; who knew then that al Qaeda had more ambitious plans for America?

As with Cole in Aden harbor, 9/11 and — of particular relevance today — the Boston marathon bombing represented failures of understanding: Radical Islam loathes the West’s liberal values; it was at war in 2000, and it remains at war today.

Still, machine-gunners surveying New York Harbor? Isn’t that a little over the top?

Well, who would’ve figured airliners flying into the World Trade Center? Or pressure-cooker bombs exploding to such terrible effect at the Marathon finish line?

But then there’s the 14 (thankfully) failed bomb plots against New York City in the years after 9/11. Or, more accurately, the 14 thwarted plots against New York City since then — efforts that came to grief largely because the Bloomberg administration understood intuitively something that appears to be lost on the recent arrivals at City Hall.

And that is this: Just as eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, infinite patience is the price of public safety in a war where one side specifically targets the other side’s public places.

Especially when the side doing the targeting is as committed, ruthless, imaginative and lacking in conscience as radical Islam.

Jamming an ammonium-nitrate bomb into a pleasure boat and ramming into Cole during Fleet Week would be a substantially more difficult task than exploding homemade devices at the Boston Marathon — but it’s a realistic possibility nevertheless.

Especially if nobody paid close attention before the fact — as appears to have been the case in Boston. The FBI, for all its hubris, hadn’t a clue about the Chechen Islamists who carried out the attack.

This would be the same FBI that New York City will become dependent upon as the de Blasio administration slowly, publicly, dismantles the intelligence-gathering infrastructure so painstakingly constructed by the NYPD after 9/11.

Yes, the department paid disproportionate attention to New York’s Muslim community. But no serious person claims that the program was in any way illegal, unconstitutional or even improper. And that was no accident. Great pains were taken to stay inside the law, and that’s exactly what happened.

Nevertheless, Mayor de Blasio announced last week that he has disbanded a small intelligence-assessment bureau inside the NYPD’s anti-terror unit — in obvious preparation for shelving the latter altogether.

At least that’s what de Blasio more or less promised while campaigning last fall — on the grounds that it singled out the city’s Muslims.

Well, yes. Where else would one expect to find Islamist terrorists? Don’t they comport themselves, in a sense, as fish swimming in the sea?

Complete safety is unobtainable, of course. But reasonable precautions, born of experience, are something else.

The Navy learned a lesson in self-protection in Aden harbor, and took it to heart. The NYPD, with 14 stymied terror plots already to its credit, now is headed in precisely the opposite direction.

It may come to regret this.