A Few Of My Thoughts About The Recent Terrorist Plot

Topic(s): me,politics
2006-08-14 01:28:43 PDT

I spend entirely too much time reading Wikipedia. Sometimes I find myself reading articles such as sand, which can't be described as much else other than a complete waste of time. (I was curious about the black sand I had just visited on a trip to Maui.)

The Wikipedia article that really caught my attention all this week was the article on the August 10th foiling of the terrorist airplane bombing plot in the UK - titled by the Wikipedians as the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot.

I was stunned at the quality and volume of information in the Wikipedia article as compared to any other article I had read at any traditional news source. To name them, better than AP, Reuters, and CNN. (Note also that the Wikipedia article at present cites 93 traditional news sources, many of them the sources I just mentioned.)

I have a ton of thoughts about the terrorist plot. Too many to write down here, but I'll bang out a few now.

I have no doubt British, Pakistani, and American intelligence agencies all worked very hard to foil the plot. And no doubt they saved a lot of innocent lives.

However, it seems to me the intelligence agencies are relying on the stupidity of terrorist groups. I can't imagine why a terrorist group would hatch a plan with 20-some people involved, with airplanes as targets, and a vocal connection to casa de Osama.

I guess that plan worked once. Maybe that's what they were thinking. But ultimately, there's no way any agency can prevent some toolish person from bringing one down.

Security can prevent people from boarding with tubes of toothpaste, but it'd be really difficult to prevent someone from boarding with balloons of C4 in their stomach, for an extreme (and prehaps unrealistic) example.

And it seems the terrorists have a love affair with the airplane. I'm not sure what makes an airplane a better target than, say, a ballet performance at your local performing arts center.

Probably it's because the bombing of a plane causes more terror, which is what the terrorists really want. They don't want to kill people - that's just a side-effect of their sick, demented schemes.

The source of terror isn't the terrorists. No. It's the television. Terrorists do what they do because they know it'll spook people when viewed on the tube. Terrorist don't think pictures of a burning ballet repertory would get as much play on the news as a burning airplane carcass.

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