Posted 8:24 AM by steve

Some thoughts on the plot to blow up several aircraft mid-flight between the United States and Britain ...

One, did anyone really need to read the details to know the terrorists were not Ann Coulter and a dozen of her sorority sisters? So, on one hand, it doesn't matter that the MSM is, once again, tiptoeing around the fact that the terrorists are all Muslims. On the other hand, the MSM's refusal to call it what it is makes it that much harder for society to focus their attention on the enemy. Even Bush gets it wrong as we're not in a 'War on Terror'; terrorism is but a tactic and it makes no more sense to say we're fighting terror than to say the Israelis are fighting rocket attacks. They're being subjected to rocket attacks, just as we're subjected to terrorism. We're in a war against Muslim fanatics - who, more often than not, choose terrorism as their preferred tactic, and the longer it takes the world to recognize this, the harder it will be to win the war.

Two, if the British authorities were concerned about some of the terrorists slipping through their dragnet, wouldn't it have been wiser to ban Muslims from trans-Atlantic flights instead of banning all carry-on luggage? To paraphrase the old cliche, carry-on luggage doesn't kill people, Muslim fanatics do. But instead of doing the right, but very un-PC, thing, authorities are once again inconveniencing us all because they dare not speak the name of the true enemy, Muslims with a grudge. We all have to stand in incredibly long airport security checkpoints because authorities won't focus their attention on the group of people most likely to be carrying a bomb or another weapon onto a plane. And now we'll all have to sit and stare at one another for a six hour flight with nothing to amuse us but for some out-of-date airline magazines (and not only are they out of date, there are never enough of them!) because the authorities again won't focus their efforts where they are most likely to do some good.

Three, I wonder the extent to which British and US anti-terrorist agencies were able to discover and prevent this plot from being carried out because of information garnered from one of the many programs which our wonderful NYT has revealed the details of to the world... and the extent to which similar plots in the future won't be discovered because the terrorists have been warned. For example, was the SWIFT program instrumental in tracking the money flowing to these terrorists? Was the NSA's wiretapping programs any help in discovering this plot? Were authorities able to pick up clues about this plot from interrogations of prisoners held in one of the no-longer secret jails in Eastern Europe? Did any information come from terrorists 'rendered' to a friendly country for some 'unfriendly' interrogations?

I know that, in polls, most people say they're against torturing suspects... but, if torture was used and it did produce information that led to this plot being thwarted, I can guarantee that there are several thousand people (passengers, flight crews, and their families and friends) who are real glad such a distasteful tactic was used. As I have written before, it's all well and good to say you're for or against something in an abstract setting. It's a whole different feeling when it's your loved ones and friends who are the beneficiaries.

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