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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 I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.”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.

Hamas and Fatah human rights abuses documented

The man I am sitting with in the photo below, taken in Jericho last Saturday, is Bassem Eid, the founder and manager of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Mr. Eid is a Muslim and a member of the largest Arab tribe in the West Bank.



Right to left: the author, Bassem Eid, Ruth Lautt.

Mr. Eid formerly helped monitor and investigate claims of human rights violations by the Israelis. After the founding of the Palestinian Authority by the Oslo agreements, Eid noticed that no one was paying attention to HR violations by the PA or Palestinian militias. So Eid founded the PHRMG in 1996.

PHRMG's latest revelations of human-rights violations by the PA and Hamas were released yesterday, entitled, "Fatah and Hamas Human Rights Violations in the Palestinian Occupied Territories from June 2007 to October 2007" (PDF online).

No one else is doing the work that Bassem Eid and his small number of assistants are doing. He was arrested by the PA in the 1990s, but was held only a day. The fact that his tribe is the largest in the West Bank - and therefore has the most muscle to retaliate against anyone who might harm him - is almost certainly the only reason he is still breathing.

I'll post a summary of our conversation with Mr. Eid soon.

Hamas rockets pushing Israel's patience

The news today is that Israel fired missiles into Gaza to kill Mubarak al-Hassanat, a top-ranking Hamas member directly involved with firing Hamas' homemade Kassan rockets into southern Israel. Hamas has been firing the anti-personnel rockets into Israeli towns and countryside with regularity for years. I went to Israel on Oct. 15 and returned just tonight. Two days ago I visited the town of Sederot (sometimes spelled Sderot) and nearby Ashkelon. Sederot is a little more than a kilometer from Gaza:



That's me standing on the southern edge of Sederot. Gaza is only a few hundred meters on the other side of the tree line behind me. Six rockets fell on Sederot a few hours before we arrived. Here are the remains of three of them.



There is a large rack of exploded rockets outside the town's police station. They have a diagram explaining how the rockets are made.



These are purely anti-personnel rockets. They lack the explosive power to penetrate unreinforced buildings. The warhead section is loaded with pellets or small ball bearings intended to do nothing but shred flesh, propelled by only a couple of pounds of high explosive. However, if they do hit an ordinary building (as a rocket did yesterday) they can damage it substantially:



Israel has tethered three blimps around the northern perimiter of Gaza with automated warning sensors and systems.



The town official who showed us around said it is optically based. Whern a launch is detected, every speaker in the town - and there are a lot of warning speakers - announced "red dawn" over and over. Townspeople have only 20 seconds to seek shelter. The town continues to build shelters such as this one.



Here is a video of the extent of the rack of recovered detonated rockets. This rack shows only six months worth of rockets launched.

Two dawn shots from Galilee

Via email from OHC contributor Daniel Jackson

Galil Dawn"

After several days of very sandy (literally) days, the dawn's light over the Galilee for the last several days has been excellent. I have been getting up before dawn the last few days to climb the side of Mount Turan to photograph the dawn. It's been spectacular as the Galil Dawn image shows taken from the east ridge looking east over Tiberias towards Syria. My sailor's sense, however, reminds me that "red in the morning" is not always a good sign.

North Bound"

The other morning, when I was up on Mount Turan, I happened to turn to the north, over the crest of the ridge and thought that the stars with the pines made a nice shot. Suddenly, the International Space Station caught the light just under the constellation Cassiopeia. This was an image too good to miss. So, I took a 30 second exposure as the ISS sped northward to the North Star. I felt like a kid. There was a time when the fast steam locomotives would flash across the wide expanses carrying the mail and chopping seconds off records. As late as 1975, when I lived in Iowa for a while, kids would go down to the tracks to watch the Burlington Northern roar through the old station that was closed years before. So, here I am in the Galilee watching this marvel streak across the sky feeling like a kid again. I jumped up and down calling out; I even waved my hat. But, the conductor could not see me--he had to make tracks and a schedule to keep.

Click on image for full-size view showing the station's light track clearly.

Muslim scholars call for peace

One hundred thirty Muslim scholars have sent a letter to Pope Benedict and other Christian religious leaders calling for competition between Islam and Christianity " 'only in righteousness and good works.' "

"If Muslims and Christians are not at peace, the world cannot be at peace. With the terrible weaponry of the modern world; with Muslims and Christians intertwined everywhere as never before, no side can unilaterally win a conflict between more than half of the world's inhabitants," the scholars wrote. ...

Using quotations from the Bible and the Koran to support their message, the scholars told people who relished conflict and destruction that "our very eternal souls are" at stake "if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony."

So let our differences not cause hatred and strife between us. Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works."

The letter was signed by Muslim scholars from around the world, including the Algerian religious affairs minister, Bouabdellah Ghlamallah, and the grand mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa.

These are very fine sentiments and the letter should be warmly received by the Pope and the other Christian leaders. Let me propose, however, that sentiments (by either faith) will not do the job. Both sides much adopt and teach true "think and let think" habits among their faithful. This will be much more difficult for Muslims than Christians. Freedom of personal conscience and personal religion will have to be adopted by Muslim societies before the sentiments expressed by the scholars can become reality.

Example: while the scholars were writing their letter, the secretary-general of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America (AMJA), Dr. Sheikh Salah Al-Sawy, issued a fatwa declaring "that marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man is forbidden and invalid, and that children born of such a union are illegitimate." The fatwa says, among other things,

"A person must have some buffer between him and [deeds] that will bring him to perdition. A person about to commit suicide may expect society to intervene in order to safeguard his right to live. This is why shari'a prohibits marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man - because it is the first step towards religious suicide, whether [it is the woman's] suicide or that of the children she will bear. This [form of] suicide is much worse than actual suicide, which also [involves] the murder of [unborn children]. The woman can expect Muslim society to stand between her and this fate, thereby safeguarding her faith and her salvation in the world to come."

Not that at least some Christians don't need to look in the mirror when it comes to intolerance:

Slash-and-burn columnist Ann Coulter shocked a cable TV talk-show audience Monday when she declared that Jews need to be "perfected" by becoming Christians, and that America would be better off if everyone were Christian.

Coulter made the remarkable statements during an often heated appearance to promote her new book on advertising guru Donny Deutsch's CNBC show "The Big Idea."

In response to a question from Deutsch asking Coulter if "it would be better if we were all Christian," the controversial columnist responded: "Yes."

"We should all be Christian?" Deutsch repeated.

"Yes," Coulter responded, asking Deutsch, who is Jewish, if he would like to "come to church with me."

Deutsch, pressing Coulter further, asked, "We should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians?" She responded: "Yeah."

Coulter deflected Deutsch's assertion that her comments were anti-Semitic, matter-of-factly telling the show's obviously upset host, "That is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews."

A transcript of their conversation about Jews appears at the link. It must be read to believed. Ann Coulter is probably the most religiously uninformed public figure I have ever heard of. I do not consider myself a "perfected Jew" as a Christian, nor can I help but gagging at the idea Ann expressed (see transcript) that Christianity is the "Federal Express" way to heaven compared to Judaism. Before Ann or any other Christian starts talking about "perfecting Jews" they need to pay attention to perfecting Christians, for which there is very way long to go.

Foxnews.com has more about the scholars' letter.

An incovenient ruling

A few days ago the news was released that a High Court in the United Kingdom ruled that Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, may not be shown to school students there unless preceded by court-mandated disclaimers:

... The Court found that the film was misleading in nine respects and that the Guidance Notes drafted by the Education Secretary’s advisors served only to exacerbate the political propaganda in the film.

In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Nine inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

The inaccuracies are:

* The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
* The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.
* The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
* The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
* The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
* The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
* The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
* The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
* The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

Sure it can!

James Joyner picks up on Mario Cuomo's piece in the NYT in which Mario says that Senators Jim Webb and Hillary Clinton are off track when they want Congress to enact law demanding that the president "go before Congress to ask for a 'declaration of war' before proceeding with an attack against Iran or any other nation."

But there is no need for this demand to be put into law, as the two Democrats and their colleagues are seeking to do, any more than there is need for legislation to guarantee our right of free speech or anything else protected by the Constitution.

Article I, Section 8 already provides that only Congress has the power to declare war.

Mario has more to say, of course, and James goes on to discuss how the warring powers of the executive and the Congress have been muddied since Thomas Jefferson's administration.

But here's the part of Mario's piece that caught my eye:

Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this mandate was neither erased nor modified by the actions or inactions of timid Congresses that allowed overeager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without making a declaration.

What??? "... the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion..."???

Sure it can, Mario, it happens all the time! The earliest example I can think of was Justice John Marshall's declaration in Marbury v. Madison that the Supreme Court could invalidate the actions of the other two branches of government. Yet the Constitution does not grant the Supreme Court any such authority. As Thomas Jefferson complained,

In denying the right [the Supreme Court usurps] of exclusively explaining the Constitution, I go further than [others] do, if I understand rightly [this] quotation from the Federalist of an opinion that 'the judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other departments of the government, but not in relation to the rights of the parties to the compact under which the judiciary is derived.' If this opinion be sound, then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de se [act of suicide]. For intending to establish three departments, coordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation. For experience has already shown that the impeachment it has provided is not even a scare-crow . . . The Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."

—Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 1819. ME 15:212

So Mr. Cuomo might want to think again.