Saturday, October 30, 2010

Mailing It In

An arrest was made in the recent bomb plot:

Yemeni forces on Saturday arrested a woman believed to be involved in sending explosive packages bound for the United States which triggered a global security alert, a Yemeni security official said.

The arrest was the first in the case, in which two air freight packages containing bombs -- both sent from Yemen and addressed to synagogues in Chicago -- were intercepted in Britain and Dubai.

I've read reports that worry about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as a force to be reckoned with. Certainly, the Panty Bomber case and this case show that they hate us enough to try to kill us.

But allow me to differ a bit by noting that isn't it a little weak to be mailing the bombs in? What happened to getting terrorists into the US to plot and carry out an attack? What happened to sending a suicide bomber on our flights to try and kill us?

Instead of that, they tried to mail bomb us from Yemen. Kind of pathetic isn't it, for people that dream of a global caliphate that they run?

By all means, hunt them down and kill them all. But while the enemy continues to hate us despite our president's outreach to the Moslem world, (And why shouldn't that fail? Remember, we are at war with jihadis and not the Moslem world.) they haven't become super villains. They're mailing it in at this point.

UPDATE: The bombs themselves were pretty poor quality:

Does Al Qaeda in Yemen lack ability to attack West?If the plot was claimed by Al Qaeda's franchise in Yemen, a group inspired by but largely separate from Osama bin Laden's central organization, it would underscore the group's determination to strike in the US. But the fact that none of the devices exploded or otherwise caused harm may signal that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla (AQAP), as the group is known, has so far failed to develop the expertise necessary to carry out attacks abroad. ...

“The problem, though, is that the appearance and set-up of the bombs look amateurish, which could indicate that Samir Khan, who created Inspire Magazine, and his band of inexperienced AQAP members were behind the attacks since Khan has no military, bomb training, or field experience,” says Aaron Zelin, an Al Qaeda researcher at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't take them seriously--if they keep trying to kill us, they'll either get better or just lucky.

So take advantage of whatever weaknesses they have to kill them more effectively before they learn or catch a break.