New year but same old government double-speak on patent terrorist attack in which at least twelve were killed and dozens more wounded.

It’s not bad enough that we are forced to begin 2025 by grappling with a horrific terrorist mass-murder attack on revelers in New Orleans; we are also being tormented by the FBI’s habitual woke incoherence regarding the atrocity.

According to the latest reports I’ve seen, the death toll is now up to a dozen people, rammed by a zealot who drove a white truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street at about 3:15 A.M. local time. Up to three dozen other innocent people were injured, some obviously very severely (the original death toll was given as ten and has ticked up as some of those injured have perished). Once the truck was stopped, the driver is said to have opened fire with some kind of gun, striking two police officers (I have not seen definitive reporting on the cops’ condition).

The FBI took the lead in the investigation after the New Orleans police initially responded.

The driver has not been identified. According to NBC News, an unidentified federal law-enforcement official says the driver is “believed to be dead” — which is a strange bit of information (if the source is actually a fed in the information loop, said fed should know whether the suspect is deceased). The FBI has confirmed that there was at least one improvised explosive device found on the scene — it’s unclear for now whether there were more, how many, and the state of their operability. Photographs of the truck indicate it had a flag pole on the back, at the top of which was some kind of black object. I can’t tell from looking at the pictures I’ve seen whether it was a flag or something else; some reports say it was a flag – perhaps a black jihadist flag of the type made notorious by al-Qaeda and ISIS.

As we know from many past experiences, initial reports on these incidents tend to be rife with error. I don’t mean to be opaque here; it’s just that this mass-casualty incident happened only a few hours ago, and there is much we just don’t know.

That said, there should be no hesitancy in saying that this incident is being investigated as a terrorist attack. It was an obvious mass-murder attack by someone who was clearly trying to kill as many as possible — even prepared to kill with other weapons once the truck-weaponization component of the attack was completed. The attack, moreover, fits a common terrorism pattern of vehicle-ramming attacks.

Nevertheless, Alethea Duncan, the special agent in charge (SAC) of the FBI’s New Orleans Field Office, stated at a press conference this morning that the bureau does not consider the mass-murder attack a “terrorist event” at this point. The same unidentified official who told NBC the suspect “is believed to be” dead amplified that the bureau is investigating the incident as a “potential terrorist attack” but must be careful in the words it uses publicly at this premature stage.

This is maddening, but in the FBI, as it has “evolved” since the Obama era, it is standard operating procedure.

There should be no problem stating that one is investigating what is manifestly a terrorist attack as a terrorist attack. One investigates based on educated suspicion — there is no requirement that one must be able prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt in order to investigate it on the assumption that it is what it appears to be. That is common sense.

But the FBI long ago retired common sense out of fear of being perceived — by its “partners” in the Muslim community and its superiors in Washington — as equating terrorism with Islam. Ergo, the FBI is reluctant to use the T-word in the absence of solid evidence establishing “operational ties” between the suspect in an attack and a known terrorist organization.

Of course, this obscures the very real possibility that the suspect may be “inspired” by jihadist doctrine, even if he is not a member of a known jihadist organization. But the FBI can’t acknowledge that. This is due to Obama-Biden guidance that has transmogrified counterterrorism, which tends to be ideologically driven, into “countering violent extremism,” in which investigators are instructed to blind themselves to ideology and focus only on violence. An acknowledgment by the bureau that an attacker may have been “radicalized” by fundamentalist Islam would implicitly concede that there is something about that ideology that inspires violent attacks against infidels. Can’t have that.

This dizzying illogic also explains why the FBI hesitates to identify the suspects in these cases even though investigators usually discover the identity in short order. If the suspect is a Muslim, this naturally feeds into the commonsense conclusion that the suspect was catalyzed by scripturally based jihadist doctrine — precisely the conclusion the FBI has been trained to resist.

Again, as of this publication, the suspect has not been identified. Obviously, it is not necessarily the case that we have a jihadist terrorist attack on our hands. Sharia supremacism is not the only ideology that encourages violent attacks — although it is the most prevalent such ideology globally and has been a distinct challenge to American national security since the late Seventies. All that said, there is nothing irrational about suspecting jihadist terrorism based on the government’s past performance — its reluctance to divulge rudimentary information — in these scenarios. And it is irrational to refrain from stating forthrightly that a terrorist attack is being investigated as a terrorist attack.

We’ll keep monitoring.