Yet, despite the horrific nature of the attacks in the past, from a counterterrorism perspective the events in Mumbai were even more worrisome.
Over the past eight months, American counterterrorism officials have monitored with growing alarm a rising number of electronic intercepts and tips from informants suggesting that Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen has been ramping up plots to attack the United States.
Whether the measure becomes law, and when, now depends on the government's success in navigating the new counterterrorism bill past the House of Lords, where it may not be introduced until the fall and where it is expected to meet stronger opposition.
The inquiries were made after a legal opinion in April by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department endorsed the constitutionality of past efforts by F.B.I. counterterrorism agents to solicit help from local police forces to gather intelligence on antiwar and political demonstrations.
"It's a deliberate attack designed to ruin the reputation of an institution that's over 100 years old," David Gomez, a former FBI counterterrorism executive (and past VICE contributor), told me Wednesday of the GOP broadsides against his old employer.
But the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December.
The United States has had numerous counterterrorism successes in the past few years, but this month's events prove that we are still fighting a serious battle against terrorists in North Africa, Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere.
In response, the counterterrorism center in the past several days has picked more than three dozen of its most capable analysts from across its ranks to form what it calls pursuit teams to focus on threats from Yemen and other offshoots of Al Qaeda that could imperil the United States, officials said.
"The scale of this is completely different from what we've experienced in the past," Gilles de Kerchove, the European Union's counterterrorism coordinator, said at the conference in Aspen.
That fact was a measure of the ambitious counterterrorism program created here in the past few years.
