"When it comes to French domestic intelligence services, they're pretty hard-core about preventing this type of thing. I think they do a lot of stuff that the US media would love to report on if they ever learned about it. But, the intelligence services also have quite a large number of people to keep tabs on."
They are the best in the world.
And for all of the famed French "independence", the French counterintelligence agency in Paris is the ONLY major counterintelligence agency of any major power, including the UK, USA, Israel, that will take direct tasking from foreign governments and execute operations based on foreign requests. When it comes to suppressing terrorists, French intelligence is the most "Western" - in the global sense - of any of the Western powers. The US CIA will not take tasking directly from French or British intelligence, for example. The French will almost invariably ACT when requested - they will pick someone up, put in the bug, etc. - and then pull it later if it proves to be ill founded. In an age of shadowy terrorists and speed-of-light local communication, there is no time to stand on ceremony.
Obviously when the lives of a city at stake, there can be no question of human rights of captured terrorists. They will given information. Drugs break down their mind and resistance and make them unable to discern realities. And physical pressure, as necessary, accomplishes the rest. Errors are made, and the innocent sometimes die. That happens in war, and it cannot be avoided. The alternative: subjecting intelligence operations to any sort of judicial or constitutional control whatsoever, will mean bombs going off in the underground, or Paris skyscrapers falling with thousands of deaths, or bombs and aeroplanes flying into French government buildings.
When one compares what is at stake, one understands that the intelligence services must have the authority to bug anybody, and to conduct whatever espionage is necessary, and to do whatever else is necessary to get information.
Of course in a country of laws, this must all be sub-rosa.
And yet it must go on.
And finally, national secrets must be such that the government has the absolute authority to censor anything that is to be published or broadcast before it happens. There cannot be a question of unravelling the whole intelligence network because a reporter discovers something. If that thing discovered is a national secret, that reporter has no right to publish or speak it in France, or anywhere else. Obviously if that reporter chooses to leave the country and to attempt to do so abroad, measures must be taken to ensure that war secrets of France are not publicized.
The American CIA will execute reporters who are about to publish CIA operative names in foreign papers.
The war on terrorists is a war. It is not a game. In war, there are different rules, and there must be different rules, or else a country will be destroyed.
There is a crazy assumption made, that every Arab is an Islamist, and that every Muslim will be solidaire with his "Islamist brethren". Of course men are weak and fickle, can be bought or threatened. Nobody hates the Israelis more than the Palestinians, and yet the Mossad gets good information from Palestinians, and not primarily by torture, but by other means. Individuals are always pressure points.
All of this said, bombs could still go off in Paris. It is far less likely than in New York, or London, Madrid or Moscow, but it could happen.
And if it does, you can expect an even more firm crackdown to be taken.
Do recall that Argentina and Chile both won their "dirty wars" against the Communists, and Communists were well over 30% of those populations.
To act, people MUST be led. If you identify the natural leaders, and neutralize them one way or the other, you make a people - however angry - incapable of acting in concert against you.
All that Islamists in France can succeed in doing, by attacks, is reinforcing the belief that, deep down, Le Pen is right. France will not overtly support Le Pen. But France will expel as many males as are needed to be expelled in order to stabilize the nation. There is really no question about this.