The New York Police Department is looking at the possibility that an internationally known terrorist suspect (who?) has entered the United States as part of a plot to bomb the New York City subway system. This, of course, is a follow-on from purported intelligence picked up from a suspect in Iraq, who hinted at a plot here involving 19 (note the number, which, in my view, instantly added a “shades of Tom Ridge” element to the story) insurgent-terrorists infiltrating New York w ith a plot to blow up backpacks and baby carriages.
For its part, the NYPD has stepped up security measures, including bomb sniffing dogs and the like at key locations in the subway system. Query, of course, whether AQ is likely to attack a city supposedly prepared for it to do so? In some sense, if the AQ bastards manage to do something like that while everybody is watching, their ability to generate terror (the basis for their political leverage; note that it has long since achieved one of its principal political objectives, the ostensable U.S. withdrawal from Saudi Arabia proper; other aspects of the AQ legacy are everywhere…) would grow exponentially.
OTOH, OBL has simply altered his business plan, and now plots for the removal of all western powers from all Moslem nations. Given that his definition of Moslem nations would most certainly include Israel, and might even include, oh, Spain, and would certainly include any Islamic nation with Western leanings (like Morocco… or Indonesia… or Turkey… or without doubt Iraq, or…) this plan could take a while, and be very, very violent for a long, long time.
Of course, this plays into the hands of our own government, which has given us reason to be somewhat skeptical: a large-scale, never-ending “war for security” is a justification for just about everything from rampant abuse of executive power to rampant deficit spending; in my very, very cynical moments, I note that if OBL didn’t exist, our current government would be sure to try to invent him (and no doubt relishes having him out there as a useful bogeyman.) Of course, re-casting all of this as a “global struggle” (for whatever it is) may actually have the virtue of being more accurate; but it is in no sense reassuring to me as I consider whether to take my small child into Manhattan on the New York City subway today, or stay home, lest it be today that hostilities in the global whatever it is resume here in the Western Front of the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism.
Such is the world in which we live, on this day when (stateside, anyway) we celebrate Christopher Columbus, one of the great spearheads of everything good and bad about Western domination of large parts of the planet, who landed at (IIRC) San Salvador somewhere in the Bahamas around 512 or 513 years ago…
tdog
I read somewhere, recently, that the subway intel from the federal government had the date of attack on Sunday rather than Thursday, which was the day Bloomberg chose to rile up new yorkers. Call me a cynic, but I am having difficulty figuring out the reason for this overt discrepency in days/dates (not a workday like Sunday, and the day of the debate at the Apollo).
Yep. By the time John Gibson was babbling on about 19 briefcase bombs I pretty much assumed it was bogus. Still, I wonder if subway rider insecurity will rise when commuters start to wear bulky winter coats.