Attorney General Holder said that the arrest of the ‘Time Square Bomber’ was a success in the fight against terrorists. In the strict sense of how the word is used by the police, perhaps it was; a crime was committed, and a perpetrator was arrested.
Of course, there are some other issues. The accused was able to do the following:
- successfully travel into and out of Pakistan at least seven times
- receive training from a Taliban group of some sort at a Taliban training facility
- build an improvised explosive device
- transport that device to the middle of Manhattan
- initiate the device
- leave the area and evaded police for several days
- board an airplane to leave the country
Thankfully, the man’s skills in assembling the device were wanting and the device failed to explode. That fact, and that fact alone, is what separates this incident from being a spectacular and painful terrorist attack in the middle of New York.
But the Attorney General said it was a success.
One reporter on a morning news show on Wednesday said ‘let’s hope that we continue to have such vigilant citizens’ or words to that effect. Two thoughts: hope is not a plan. And US taxpayers aren’t paying for vigilant citizens. I applaud the efforts of the man who noted something wrong with the vehicle and notified police. He is an outstanding citizen and an example to us all. But, I would suggest Mayor Bloomberg, while wandering around denying terrorism exists, consider awarding the keys of the city to this man. (In case you missed it, Mayor Bloomberg said this about the failed attack after a question as to whether this might be a homegrown terrorist: "If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that. Homegrown, or maybe a mentally deranged person, or somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.")
To the point, the system did fail. The bomb was built and placed in position and initiated. Granted, this is an exceptionally difficult thing to stop. And trying to write more restrictive laws to prevent people from buying the gear or chemicals necessary to build a bomb is meaningless; anyone who knows anything about chemistry will tell you how impossible that is. That this man failed is a sign of his lack of intelligence, nothing else.
It is also worth remembering that if the bomb had worked, we would not have had the vehicle available to search for clues and the various security cameras that contained key pieces of information that led police to the bomber would have probably been lost.
But Attorney General Holder’s remarks that ‘this was a success’ marks the real problem: from the perspective of someone who deals with situations from a police or prosecuting attorney’s perspective, it was a success: a crime was committed and a perpetrator was arrested. Such actions prevent the same man from committing a second crime. But they don’t prevent the next terrorist from committing the next attack.
What failed here, and it is a very difficult problem to deal with, is that the intelligence community failed. It failed because it failed to penetrate the Taliban network, it failed to penetrate the training facilities, it failed to identify the people who have been or are now in the facilities. Is this difficult? Yes, very difficult. But it is what the system needs to do to protect the country.
Recently, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis (DDNI/A) from 2005 to 2008 stated that the level of collaboration and information sharing within the intelligence community today is far different and better then it has been for many decades. This may be so. Frankly, I doubt it. Reminiscent of many senior members of the Intelligence Community of the past who would defend their positions by simply claiming that they had intelligence you hadn’t and couldn’t see, he defends his position by claiming a certain level of supremacy, suggesting that if you don’t agree you “are ill-informed or disingenuous.”
The fact is that the intelligence community, despite the hard work of tens of thousands of folks ‘in the trenches,’ is still not organized or led to provide the level of security the people of this nation believe they deserve. In both the case of the ‘Christmas Bomber’ and the ‘Time Square Bomber’ we succeeded despite the Intelligence Community and despite the improvements in collaboration boasted of by the DDNI/A.
To those inside the IC, the real collectors and analysts who are working as hard as they can on these problems every day, who will object, saying something to the effect that this is just ‘too hard,’ ‘we can’t stop every bomber,’ my response is this: imagine if both those terrorists had been successful. After the ‘Christmas Bomber’ succeeded in downing an aircraft we would have found the warnings by his father, the odd behavior, etc. After the ‘Time Square Bomber’ succeeded in setting off a car bomb in mid-town Manhattan we would have eventually found who it was, his multiple trips in and out of Pakistan, his time spent in Taliban training facilities.
We averted two ugly, potentially horrific attacks, but we did so through the failings of the attackers, not through our own competence or diligence. We have benefited from their errors, which have been more consequential then our errors. Sooner or later, if we don’t fix really things, our string of luck is going to run out.
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