2 May 2010 And the war moves closer to home again

2 May 2010 And the war moves closer to home again


While we were listening to good music and taking admission money at a dance yesterday evening, someone tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, NYC. Whether timely detection, faulty construction, or some other reason prevented it detonating, many lives and many injuries were, fortunately, avoided.

We’ve had relatively few successful terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Two attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, The Murraw building, the attack on United States Capitol shooting incident of 1954, a small bomb in the U.S. Capital, the Ft. Hood shooting, & the Wisconsin math building lead the list. Other attempts including assassination attempts failed and successful against politicians can be considered terrorism. Numerous school shootings have taken place but those are less about terrorism than about loopholes in our gun laws allowing mentally ill people access to firearms. A few successful embassy bombings, troop barracks bombings and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, while deadly, happened offshore.

As a nation, we’ve been fortunate. We’ve, for the most part, been able to avoid mass casualties caused by political or religious terrorists. We’ve managed to improve communications between agencies tasked with public safety and national defense. We’ve been lucky in learning about planned attacks more than better at catching plotters. We treasure our civil liberties, even those of us who don’t truly understand what they are and how they are secured. So we err on the side of missing many plots rather than on the side of arresting more innocent, or as yet innocent, people.

In defense, we’re fighting the “last” war instead of the current war. We’ve added all manner of tactics to catch people using old bomb smuggling tactics: shoes, laptops, radios, etc. But we don’t screen people as we should because we don’t want to offend minority religions, populations, or appear to be racially profiling. We’ll eventually find that the Israeli methods we’ve yet to employ work better than anything we have put into place today.

The primary questions about the Times Square car bomb attempt are: who and why. Is it religious, Islamic fundamentalism? Is it Christian fundamentalism/anti-abortion? Is it political, someone worked up over taxes, health care, our first black POTUS, a gun nut afraid of having his firearms confiscated, or over any of a dozen other blatant lies created and circulated by the GOP lobbyists?

We need to know if this attempt was part of a group attack or a single person over the edge. We need to know if there were more cars, equally loaded, that also failed but that weren’t noticed. Was this intended as a distraction or as an attraction?

Having just completed a CSI survey class, a lot of things about evidence in and about the vehicle and components come to mind. It would be interesting to be working on this case. I think we’re going to see a lot more attempts at this sort of attack. We’re being dragged into unity with the rest of the western world. Our oceans no longer protect us.

Nor do we protect our oceans. The oil well spewing 5000 + barrels of oil every day in the Gulf of Mexico is more of a disaster than the bomb in Times Square would have been. We have allowed drilling companies and service companies to join with oil lease holders to avoid responsibility for the disaster and to avoid being required to act in a timely and correct manner to prevent ecological damage. BP, Halliburton, and the drilling rig owner/operator will dump the cleanup onto our federal government while they collectively share in the increased revenues from increased oil prices. Make no mistake, oil prices will go up as a result of this blowout. CEO salaries will go up, Halliburton’s profits will go up, and taxes on gasoline will go up.

The Gulf fishing industry, already in trouble and depending in too many cases on over-fished species is going to be damaged for a long time. Shrimp, scallops, oysters, crabs, grouper, snapper, and other prized sea food will become scarce and exorbitantly expensive. Fishing communities and those that depend upon them run the risk of becoming ghost towns. Families all over the Gulf coast are going to lose their homes, their jobs, their boats, and their way of life.

Somehow, it does not surprise me that Halliburton is involved in yet another disaster.