Long Live Lady Luck
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT
One of the most striking things about our recent midterm elections is that foreign policy played absolutely no part in the voting — and for that we have Lady Luck, and some good intelligence work, to thank. In fact, in the past year we’ve won the lottery five times in row. How often does that happen?
Let’s review: We got incredibly lucky that the Al Qaeda-inspired Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was unable to detonate the explosives sewn into his underpants, as his Delta airliner, with 278 passengers, was approaching the Detroit airport last Christmas Day. Ditto for Faisal Shahzad, whose homemade bomb packed into a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder failed to go off after he detonated it in a crowded Times Square on May 1. In February, thanks to good intelligence work, Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant, pleaded guilty in a New York courtroom to plotting with Al Qaeda to kill himself — and as many other people as possible — by setting off a bomb in a New York City subway near the anniversary of 9/11.
Then, last week, security teams removed packages from cargo planes in Britain and the United Arab Emirates bound for Chicago. Inside, they found bombs wired to cellphones and hidden in the toner cartridges of computer printers. The bombs, timed to go off when the planes were over America, were believed to have been built by the same Saudi jihadist, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who designed the Christmas Day underwear bomb. An intelligence tip from the Saudis upset that plan.
Imagine if all five had gone off? We would be checking the underwear of every airline passenger, you would have to pass through metal detectors to walk into Times Square or take the subway, and the global air cargo industry would be in turmoil, as every package would have to be sniffed by a bomb-detecting dog.
(More here.)
NYT
One of the most striking things about our recent midterm elections is that foreign policy played absolutely no part in the voting — and for that we have Lady Luck, and some good intelligence work, to thank. In fact, in the past year we’ve won the lottery five times in row. How often does that happen?
Let’s review: We got incredibly lucky that the Al Qaeda-inspired Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was unable to detonate the explosives sewn into his underpants, as his Delta airliner, with 278 passengers, was approaching the Detroit airport last Christmas Day. Ditto for Faisal Shahzad, whose homemade bomb packed into a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder failed to go off after he detonated it in a crowded Times Square on May 1. In February, thanks to good intelligence work, Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant, pleaded guilty in a New York courtroom to plotting with Al Qaeda to kill himself — and as many other people as possible — by setting off a bomb in a New York City subway near the anniversary of 9/11.
Then, last week, security teams removed packages from cargo planes in Britain and the United Arab Emirates bound for Chicago. Inside, they found bombs wired to cellphones and hidden in the toner cartridges of computer printers. The bombs, timed to go off when the planes were over America, were believed to have been built by the same Saudi jihadist, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who designed the Christmas Day underwear bomb. An intelligence tip from the Saudis upset that plan.
Imagine if all five had gone off? We would be checking the underwear of every airline passenger, you would have to pass through metal detectors to walk into Times Square or take the subway, and the global air cargo industry would be in turmoil, as every package would have to be sniffed by a bomb-detecting dog.
(More here.)
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