Sochi and National Security

 Newt Gingrich: The Sochi Winter Olympic Games [opened] amid some of the starkest terror threats surrounding any major event in recent years.

The warnings began several weeks ago when authorities worried publicly that a suicide bomber might have already penetrated the security perimeter which is supposed to isolate Sochi from the Caucasus region.

A radical Islamist group released a video last month promising to attack the Sochi games. The same video claimed responsibility for the train station bombing in the Russian city of Volgograd last month. That attack killed 34 people.

There is some evidence that the threats are at least somewhat credible: French police yesterday arrested two Chechen women in the country. There were other arrests reported in Austria in connection with terror threats (although those suspects have apparently been released).

The United States Department of Homeland Security warned of specific information indicating terrorists might attempt to carry toothpaste or cosmetics tubes full of explosives on airplanes bound for Russia, either to carry out an attack on the planes themselves or to smuggle explosives into Sochi.

And just this afternoon, a plane made an emergency landing in Turkey after a passenger attempted to hijack it, claiming to have a bomb in the cargo area and demanding that the plane divert to Sochi.

Thirteen years and seven Olympic games into the war on terror, it’s a sign of how significant the threat remains that the headlines for weeks preceding Sochi have been about the threats of suicide bombings there.

We have a dangerous tendency to convince ourselves that an easy solution to the intractable problem of Islamic terrorism is always just around the corner. We saw it in the “Mission Accomplished” banners on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003. We saw it in the triumphalism after the killing of Osama bin Laden.

But Islamic terrorism is not “on the run.” If anything the threat appears greater now than it was in May 2011. We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the very real dangers to our security.

Those dangers extend far beyond Sochi.

Foreign trained Chechen terrorists succeeded in attacking an American city last year.

A few hours later, someone conducted a professional, military-style attack on a California power station, as I discussed earlier this week, and apparently the FBI has no idea who did it.

Afghanistan is falling apart.

Iraq is descending into violence.

War continues in Syria, which is serving as a training ground for Islamic terrorists.

Certainly we all hope for a successful and safe Olympics in Sochi and wish the American athletes the best of luck. But the larger context in which it occurs is ominous indeed.
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Newt Gingrich is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. The above commentary was shared via his  Gingrich Productions.

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