France is again reeling after another night of carnage in Nice left at least 84 Bastille Day revelers dead and dozens more injured.
While the suspect, identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was armed with a pistol, his weapon of choice for mass murder was a large truck, not explosives.
While it may be too early to speculate on his motivation, or possible affiliation for driving a truck into a crowd celebrating the French equivalent of our Fourth of July, it is the latest in a series of bloody attacks since the murder in the Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015.
After November’s Paris attacks, the French government put in place a state of emergency, which restricts civil liberties. It allows police to conduct searches without a warrant and place people under house arrest outside the normal legal process.
A French parliamentary investigation into last year’s terrorist attacks on Paris has identified multiple failings by France’s intelligence agencies. According to the British newspaper, The Guardian, the commission highlighted a “global failure” of French intelligence and recommended a total overhaul of the intelligence services and the creation of a single, US-style national counter-terrorism agency.
