Disturbing Thought of the Day

Via SpyTalk:

[Charles] Faddis, also author of “Willful Neglect, The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security,” said “terrorist groups all around the world have run probing ops in the past. Leave a package outside an embassy and then watch how security deals with it.”

“Let's hope it is not the latter, because that would imply some very smart boys have something much bigger in mind,” he said.

This would potentially explain a lot. If the device was a method to test chemical detection systems, for instance, it would be a hodge-podge of materials just like the one that was found -- gunpowder, fertilizer, propane, gasoline. And if it was to test responder times and traffic, you would make sure there were real explosives so you could track the whole process, but you wouldn't put a lot of trouble into the design.

Not enough evidence yet to say for certain, and hopefully we'll have a suspect in custody soon to refute the idea, but the number of things I don't like about the last 24 hours seems to be piling up...

UPDATE TUESDAY: CNN is now reporting a piece of data I have been waiting for. According to them, a surveillance camera caught the bomb-rigged Pathfinder entering Times Square about two minutes before it started smoking. In my opinion, this significant reduces the odds that this was a test run -- one of the things that a potential bomber would be trying to evaluate is how long the unattended vehicle could be left double-parked without attracting notice.

Labels: American-Jihadists, Faisal-Shahzad, Times-Square, Weblog

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Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink