A nation must think before it acts.
Senior Fellow Lorenzo Vidino Quoted by Rhode Island Public Radio on Barcelona Attacks
Teenagers chain-smoke in the village square in Ripoll, a tidy Catalan town in the foothills of the Pyrenees in northeast Spain. They’re trying to process what happened over summer vacation.
Theirs is one of those towns, population about 10,000, where everyone seems to know everyone. There’s a Benedictine monastery, window boxes bursting with geraniums and almost zero crime.
But this was the home of 12 terrorism suspects, including three sets of brothers, who last month attacked Barcelona, 60 miles to the south, and Cambrils, 130 miles to the south. Eight of them were killed. Two are in jail, and two others are under house arrest.