Excerpt
SUMMARY: European nations are boosting their national security efforts in the wake of the recent terrorist bombings in Brussels. How great a threat is the Islamic State group to Europe? Gwen Ifill sits down with former State Department official Daniel Benjamin and Joby Warrick of The Washington Post to learn more.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): We return to the attacks in Brussels, and what they said about the growing Islamic State threat in Europe and elsewhere.
Daniel Benjamin was coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department during the first term of the Obama administration. He’s now a professor at Dartmouth College. And Joby Warrick is a national security correspondent at The Washington Post. He’s also the author of the book “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS.”
Daniel Benjamin, was this a nightmare scenario that could have been foreseen? Yesterday, we heard people saying, this is what we feared.
DANIEL BENJAMIN, Former State Department Official: I think that people who have been watching terrorism have been fearing this for many years, actually.
The recognition that Europe had a problem with extremism in its midst and the recognition that Europe hadn’t taken security arrangements as seriously as it should have, I think, has been common. That observation has been common in the security community for many years now.
GWEN IFILL: Joby Warrick, the Associated Press, among others, have been reporting today that there were as many as 400 people being trained by ISIS to carry out these attacks in Europe. So did they not leave any footprints or any signs?
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