Terror plot in England - From Fox News: "British Police Probe Car Bomb Plot in London"
This foiled effort comes only two days after Gordon Brown took over as Prime Minister from a retiring Tony Blair. This reminds me of the attack on the USS Cole which occurred only a month before the 2000 presidential election and, to a lesser extent, Khobar Towers occurring a couple of months before the 1996 election. Is it possible the Muslim extremists search for opportunities when governments are in transition, in the expectation that it will lead to inaction?
More - Expat Yank, located in Dorset, has the latest.
Update - The Brits have a "crystal clear" picture of a suspect.
7 comments:
Remind us again why two defective car bombs (which were unlikely to kill anyone not sitting IN the car) are worthy of saturation coverage? But real exploding car bombs and real roadside devices and real soldier deaths get the usual 25 seconds' worth of "duly noted"?
Must be that liberal media!
Do you right wingers always get so excited about so-called "terror" attacks that don't even take place?
Scary!! It's the end of civilization! The Republic is in danger! Everybody down in the bomb shelters!
This non-event gets breathless coverage 24/7, while the true mayhem committed by our troops in Iraq is buried under stories about Paris Hilton spending a few days in the pokey.
Try to be brave for once, and stop wetting yourself every time something doesn't happen.
Sorry Anon, I'll try to be as brave as you.
In other news, did you hear those weenie Brits raised their terror level to "critical"? Whatever happened to "stiff upper lip", eh?
Yeah, look at those panicking pantywaists, doing their job in precisely the same way they've been doing for over 35 years (remember the IRA?).
Let us know when they start advising British citizens to stock up on duct tape, changing the word "sandwich" to "queenwich," talking about mushroom clouds over Hyde Park, and calling the opposing party traitors for not loving their country.
"These guys could barely be considered amateurs they were so inept," said Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism expert at the State Department... "The first car, they could barely get a fire started but no one thought to lower the window to feed the fire. You can turn gasoline into an explosive but they didn't know what to do. Even if those tanks exploded, they don't burst apart into thousands of pieces of shrapnel. They tend to break apart at the seam."
The second attack in Glasgow was even more amateurish, said terrorism analysts.
Ian Lustick, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of "Trapped in the War on Terror," said... "They try three times, and finally the guy had to set himself on fire and he even failed at that. They were true believers, but it doesn't sound at all like al Qaeda."
"When you talk about amateur hour, you could be talking about the hucksters in Queens who wanted to blow up the fuel line or the Rastafarians who wanted to blow up the Sears Tower," said Lustick. "Crazy people gravitate toward that type of fantasy when they go crazy. But in Europe, their Muslim populations are different from ours, and they were not as well assimilated. They are much more isolated, and that's why you get much more serious activity in Europe, whereas the Americans didn't even come close to carrying out their operations."
The key issue is that within the Muslim community there is a violent and nihilistic element, spurred on by scholars and clerics, who are making theological arguments to encourage and justify acts of murder and mayhem for the purposes of creating a modern-day caliphate. The backgrounds of the 9/11 group, as well as the different British terrorists of late, lay bare the fallacy that this brand of terrorism will go away with affluence or democracy. Sometimes the actions of these twisted souls end up looking silly and harmless. Other times the results are horrendous. The origins are the same either way.
Our actions in Iraq will do little one way or the other to stop this or remove this threat. Our military is second to none if the job at hand is to engage an enemy in a conventional war, but terrorism is an asymmetric strategy designed to give the advantage to the guerrilla. In Iraq we have made the error of allowing the enemy to define the field of battle.
Islamic terrorism will be stopped through solid police and intelligence work, and more importantly, by the determination of Muslims to reject violence in the name of their religion and to work with authorities to root it out of their mosques and communities.
An excellent, concise, and sensible post. Why do you hate America?!?!?!?
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