Times Square Bomber not as inept as media coverage

Do not link to this post - this is not the record copy, which will appear on Sense of Events on May 7.


Having been focused on the flooding here in Tennessee (what, you didn't know?), I have not posted until now about Faisal Shahzad, a.k.a. the Times Square bomber. I won't cover the back story because I presume you're familiar with it.

One persistent theme in the media has been, as the CS Monitor put it, "Times Square bomber joins the growing list of inept terrorists."

Have Al Qaeda and associated Islamist terror groups become incompetent?

Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born US citizen arrested and charged with the attempted attack, appears to have had little real training in explosives technique, according to US officials.

Well, not so fast. Let's consider first of all just how competent the media have been covering this attempted terrorist act man-caused disaster.

First up, Chris Matthews, courtesy of The Real Revo:

“I’m worried that the next time a terrorist will get through . . . . because, you’re gonna see the tea-partiers get strengthened”

Next, a grab of Gerard Vanderleun's Sideline feature:

A screen grab of the CBS headline is here. Greg Gutfield asks, Why Does Faisal Shahzad Hate Us?, but unlike other media commentators, he knows the answer:

It's only a mystery if you're in the media and really stupid. Everyone else pretty much understands why the terrorist left a fuel bomb in an area filled with families: He hates us, he wants us dead.

But the media — full of fragile egos and bubble-encased boobs — can't see that. In fact, it's kind of awesome how huge their blind spot toward radical Islam is. If only there could be other motives, so they'd never have to place blame on anything (other than America, of course).

Then we have Contessa Brewer of MSNBC, who is devastated that Shahzad is Muslim instead of a white, racist militia member (courtesy James Lileks):

“I get frustrated…” said Contessa Brewer. “There was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country. … There are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.”

The vid:



Certainly Shahzad's truck bomb was not nearly as well-assembled or equipped as his ideological allies of hamas, al Qaeda or the Taliban. But it turns out, Shahzad's bombmaking may not have been as inept as first declared, according to STRATFOR.

[T]he materials present could have caused a substantial explosion had they been prepared and assembled properly.

The main threat was from 250 pounds of urea-based fertilizer, enough to cause "serious carnage" if it had detonated, and that without including the potential effects of the pressurized tanks of propane.

urea-based fertilizer can be mixed with nitric acid to create urea nitrate, the main explosive charge used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. (It is not known if the fertilizer in the Pathfinder had been used to create urea nitrate.) Urea nitrate is a popular improvised mixture that can be detonated by a blasting cap and does not require a high-explosive booster charge like ammonium nitrate does; 250 pounds of urea nitrate would be enough to destroy the Pathfinder completely and create a substantial blast effect.

What caused Shahzad's to fail? STRATFOR says,

It appears that Shahzad made a classic “Kramer jihadist” mistake: trying to make his attack overly spectacular and dramatic. This mistake was criticized by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Nasir al-Wahayshi last year when he called for grassroots operatives to conduct simple attacks instead of complex ones that are more prone to failure. In the end, Shahzad (who was probably making his first attempt to build an IED by himself) tried to pull off an attack so elaborate that it failed to do any damage at all.

He did not follow the KISS rule - "Keep It Simple, Stupid."

But the media's ineptitude extends not just to moral blindness, but to outright malfeasance:

Some of our primary tools of counterterrorism have been severely compromised by the American press. Consider two major counterterrorism initiatives launched by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration.

The first is the so-called warrantless wiretapping of international calls by the National Security Agency. The New York Times disclosed critical details of the program in December 2005, alerting al Qaeda to our ability to monitor a high volume of phone calls and emails, not only from points in the United States to points abroad or vice versa, but also between foreign cities. ...

[Second is} the revelation, published in the New York Times in June 2006 and followed immediately by the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, that the CIA and the Treasury Department, in the search for the movement of al Qaeda funds, were tapping into the enormous database of financial transactions operated by the Belgian clearinghouse known as SWIFT.

The Times story disclosing the SWIFT program itself noted that the monitoring had achieved significant successes, including providing information leading to the arrest of Hambali, the top operative in the al Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah, who was behind the Bali bombing of 2002. In this instance even the Times’s own ombudsman, Byron Calame, concluded that the paper should not have run the story. ...

We are an open society that cannot be hardened against attacks like the one we just saw in Times Square. But a press that regards the First Amendment as a suicide pact and recklessly divulges operational counterterrorism secrets takes a very difficult problem and makes it far worse, placing us all at risk.

Yes indeed, "mainline media audience plummets, just why remains a mystery" - at least to the media themselves.