Our current wave of terror attacks was predicted by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed years ago

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is shown in this file photograph during his arrest on March 1, 2003. (Reuters Photo)

Editor’s note: The following column originally appeared on AEIdeas.org, the blog of the American Enterprise Institute. It is reprinted with permission.

It seems like every week brings news of another low-level terrorist attack. An ISIS terrorist drives a truck into a crowded Christmas bazaar in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 48 others. Another terrorist walks into an Istanbul night club on New Year’s Eve and opens fire, killing 39 people and injuring 69 more. CNN reports that since they declared their caliphate in June 2014, ISIS has conducted or inspired at least 143 terrorist attacks in 29 countries other than Iraq and Syria, that have have killed at least 2,043 people and injured thousands more.

President Obama sees this as progress. Don’t take my word for it. He has said as much.

In a December speech at MacDill Air Force Base, Obama boasted that “We should take great pride in the progress that we’ve made over the last eight years. That’s the bottom line. No foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland.”

Translation: Forget Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Nice, Istanbul, Orlando, San Bernadino, Fort Hood and the scores of other attacks, and focus on the fact the terrorists have not been able to “successfully” pull off another 9/11-style attack.

Of course this ignores the fact that in 2009, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab successfully penetrated our defenses, got a bomb onto plane in his underwear, and nearly blew up that plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. It was a failed terrorist attack, not a foiledterrorist attack. The bomb malfunctioned. Hardly a counterterrorism success.

To continue reading Marc Thiessen’s column on AEIdeas.org, click here.