Terrorism

Ohio is a Major Front of the Global War on Terror???

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Apparently so.

The link above will take you to a report about an Ohio native that conspired to use “Weapons of Mass Destruction against tourists in Germany”. Let us take a look at the implications.

Places like Columbus, Ohio were what the sophisticates had in mind when they coined the phrase “flyover country”. Natives here call Ohio’s capitol city “Cowtown”, and it isn’t always meant with wry affection. I personally like to put a positive spin on things and claim that it is the world’s largest small town.

Yet we have a native son who was not only working to assemble something which would kill indiscriminately but he planned on setting it off in another country, located on another continent.

Aiding him in this endeavor were two immigrants who had plans of their own. The guy born in Kashmir wanted to help al Qaeda destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, while the other from Somalia was interested in setting off bombs in an Ohio shopping mall during the Christmas season. Both of the immigrants had been recruited by al Qaeda while overseas, and one of them had even received some military-style training at a secret base in Ethiopia.

So a guy from Somalia trains as a terrorist in Ethiopia before hooking up with a guy from Kashmir and a local in Columbus, Ohio. They plan on causing mass death in Germany, in Columbus, and committing an act of sabotage by destroying one of America’s most iconic landmarks located in New York.

Global War on Terror, indeed.

The only reason why none of these terrible plans came to fruition is because of Bush’s supposedly illegal wiretapping project. FBI agents approached the erstwhile bridge saboteur and managed to turn him. With a double agent in place, the evidence gathered was sufficient to convict them all.

If international terrorist groups like al Qaeda have plots hatching in the very heart of America’s heartland, what must it be like in those places where things are happening? How many terrorist cells are scheming and gathering materials for their dark work this very minute in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Washington, DC?

Just a thought to speed you on your way on this fine summer day.

(Hat tip to Glenn, Gateway Pundit, and I cross posted this essay at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Jimmy Carter v 2.0?

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This writer sees a strong resemblance between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter:

IS IT POSSIBLE that America really wants to return to those depressing days of gas lines and leisure suits? Of malaise and shock over the aggressiveness of America’s enemies? The days when the policies Obama is advocating raised unemployment rates, interest rates and inflation rates into the double digits? When America’s enemies looked the President of the United States in the eye — and found he really wanted to kiss them on the cheek?

(via Common Sense & Wonder)

Speaking of Obama and Carter, here’s what Obama said on April 11 regarding the former President’s overtures toward Hamas:

I’m not going to comment on former President Carter. He’s a private citizen. It’s not my place to discuss who he shouldn’t meet with.

…and on April 16, he “clarified” his position a bit:

Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama on Wednesday disagreed with former President Jimmy Carter’s overtures toward Hamas, saying he would not talk to the Islamist group until it recognized Israel and renounced terrorism. …

“That’s why I have a fundamental difference with President Carter and disagree with his decision to meet with Hamas,” Obama said.

(via LGF)

Dancing Fast and Squinting Hard

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I don’t read Industrial Equipment News on a regular basis (who does?), but they printed a fascinating article by Mark Devlin that is worth checking out.

Mr. Devlin took umbrage at a recent paper written by two sociologist PhD’s in association with the University of Oxford. In the paper, the argument is made that there is something about engineers that causes them to become murderous, right wing radicals in greater numbers than other professions. This is due to the fact that most of the movers and shakers of international Islamic terrorist organizations were trained as engineers.

The 800 pound gorilla that the two sociologists are trying oh-so-hard to ignore is that an engineering degree might just be something sought after by people who are desperate to build bombs and place them where they will do the most damage. Terrorist wannabes will take classes that reveal the weak points in infrastructure and how to use explosives, as opposed to Texas Instruments turning normal college students into monsters with their mind-warping engineering calculators.

Or, as Mr. Devlin so pithily states, “Tough to overthrow much with an English degree.”

But I actually think there are two factors that both Mr. Devlin and the authors of the paper missed.

More than a few terrorist organizations of the Left in the 1960’s and 1970’s were started by, and heavily recruited, disgruntled college students and university professors. It worked back then, why wouldn’t it work now?

(As an aside, I would like to point out that the majority of those Leftist college students who turned to terrorism were enrolled in the soft sciences, mostly philosophy. I think the authors of the Oxford study would get bent out of shape if someone would suggest that the humanities warps the mind and turns people into violent terrorists. I would never do that myself for fear that Ginny, our resident expert on the humanities and former college student in the 1970’s, would decide to retire to her kitchen and assemble something volatile from common household cleaning products.)

It is also no secret that the Arab world is hardly a hotbed of growth and innovation. Seems to me that most of the families which can afford to pay for a modern Western style education would be pushing their spawn to get a degree in the hard sciences, if for no other reason than there is a real need for development through most of the Islamic world.

I corresponded very briefly with our fellow Chicago Boyz and resident engineer Steven den Beste about this article, and he had this to say about well educated terrorists….

“As to them being disproportionately engineers, I would suggest that observation of any large university will show that the vast majority of exchange students are to be found in departments who teach utilitarian subjects. Not too many Arabs are to be found studying postmodern literary theory or art history. And I don’t think you’ll find too many of them in the Women’s Studies department, let alone Queer Studies. Or any other “studies”, for that matter.”

That appears to be sound wisdom to me.

(Hat tip to Ace.)

Asinine

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The story about the airline pilot whose pistol went off accidentally — a foreseeable outcome of idiotic storage requirements imposed by bureaucrats — will be analyzed to death by other bloggers, but the posts by Paul Huebl (via Arms & the Law) and Steve H. are particularly good.

Huebl points out that the government bureaucrats who came up with the storage/holster scheme didn’t merely ignore but went out of their way to ignore reasonable advice from law enforcement officials who are experienced with weapons. And I think that almost everyone who has commented has pointed out the absurdity of treating pilots, whom everyone trusts with the lives of hundreds of passengers, as being somehow too irresponsible to use independent judgment in handling simple weapons they have been trained to use.

I don’t think bureaucratic stupidity is the central problem. It’s more likely that the bureaucrats are responding to strong incentives that aren’t visible to outsiders — otherwise, why not take the apparent easy way out by following the cops’ suggestions? Probably, given the way bureaucracies function, and the hostility of TSA and DOT management to armed pilots, and the aversion of airline companies to lawsuits that might be brought if pilots misused their weapons, and perhaps also (as a commenter on Steve’s post suggested) lobbying by vendors of “safe storage” equipment for pilots’ firearms, the easy way out really is to make it as cumbersome and hazardous as possible for pilots to arm themselves. What better way for the bureaucratic decisionmakers and airline executives to minimize their liability while nominally accommodating political demands for armed pilots? Never mind that pilots and passengers, the people who have the most at stake, are mainly either strongly in favor of letting pilots be armed or are neutral.

Dangerous storage of guns on commercial aircraft is a consequence of involving government in an area that should have been left under the control of the people who are most accountable. If airlines could set their own policies they could allow armed pilots to follow sensible procedures, or forbid pilots from being armed. In either case an airline could follow its best judgment about the risks and benefits of armed defense against hijackers. An even better solution would be to leave the arming of pilots to airline discretion and to provide airlines with legislative immunity against lawsuits brought in cases where pilots use their weapons in good faith.

Too much of the public debate about responses to terrorism is driven by fear of lawsuits and by bureaucratic agendas that have nothing to do with national security.

UPDATE: David Foster’s 2002 post on this topic is well worth reading.

Quote of the Day

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Still, five years on, this endeavor in Iraq is taking hold. The U.S. military was invariably the great corrector. In their stoic acceptance of the mission given them and in the tender mercies they showed Iraqis on a daily basis, our soldiers held out the example of benevolent rule. (In extended travel in and out of Iraq over the last five years, I heard little talk of Abu Ghraib. The people of Iraq understood that Charles Graner and Lynndie England were psychopaths at odds with American military norms.)
 
In those five years, the scaffolding of the war came under steady assault. People said that there was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam, that no “smoking gun” had been discovered, and that the invasion of Iraq had turned that country into a breeding ground of jihadists.
 
But those looking for that smoking gun did not understand that the distinction between secular and religious terror in that Arab landscape was a distinction without a difference. The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad was a correct one. Radical Arabs attacked America on 9/11, and a war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism.
 
Baghdad was the proper return address, as a notice was served on the purveyors of terror that a price would be paid by those who aid and abet it. It was Saddam Hussein’s choice — and fate — that he would not duck and stay out of harm’s way in the aftermath of 9/11. We have not fully repaired the ways of the radicals in the intervening years. But the spectacle of the dictator’s defeat, and the sight of him being sent to the gallows, have worked wonders on the temper of the Arab street.
 
So we did not turn Baghdad into a democratic city on a hill, and we learned that the dismantling of Sunni tyranny would leave the Arab world’s Shiite stepchildren with primacy in Iraq. A better country has nonetheless risen, midwifed by this American war. It is not a flawless democracy. But compare it to the prison it was under Saddam, the tyranny next door in Damascus and the norms of the region, and we can have a measure of pride in what America has brought forth in Baghdad.

–Fouad Ajami