The Face of Terror

Via BAGnewsNotes, this collection of pictures from a school trip that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the undie bomber) took to London in 2003 may not be particularly newsworthy, but it does, as the blogger there points out, make the notion that this joker is some kind of arch supervillain that has to be tortured and tried outside the confines of the US judicial system particularly laughable. Just a few years ago, he was nothing more than a sad little boy.

Spencer Ackerman pointed out in a recent edition of Bloggingheads the days of the hardened terrorist operatives with battlefield experience--the KSMs of the jihadi world--are gone. Most of the foiled attempts in recent years have been fairly amateurish in nature, like this one. This is certainly a good thing.

QOTD

The smartest thing I've read yet on the Hanes Bomber.

Paul Campos over at LGM, on "Terrorball."

I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

How else can one explain the extreme and ongoing over-reaction to last week’s botched attempt to blow up Northwest flight 253?...demands that the government keep us completely safe from the risk of terror attacks are both absurdly infantile, and very helpful to terrorists, since such demands place the bar for what counts as successful terrorism practically on the ground.

Meanwhile, in the week that began with a terrorist incident in which no one other than the pathetically incompetent aspiring terrorist was hurt, approximately 47,000 Americans died. Around 13,000 of these people never reached old age, including nearly one thousand children.

Indeed over the past seven days approximately 350 Americans were murdered. About twenty of these murder victims were women killed by their husbands and boyfriends, while something like 35 were children who died as a result of abuse. Several hundred Americans committed suicide between Christmas and New Year’s Day and several hundred others died as a direct consequence of not having any medical insurance.

All of this is considered completely natural and normal and therefore not in the slightest bit newsworthy. At the same time, President Obama is being criticized for not rushing back to Washington from his holiday vacation because a wannabe terrorist managed to set his own underwear on fire.

Read the whole thing, for goodness sake.