By now we all know the story: Al Quaida sends this young rich kid from Nigeria, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to blow up an American bound international flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. The explosive is somehow sewn into his underwear and he successfully boards the plane but fails in a burst of flame when the bomb fails to detonate. Whew! Another close call. Can you imagine the effect on our already fragile national economy if this attack had actually succeeded?
So, let me get this straight. Al Qaida has studied our security methods over the past decade and have come to the conclusion that the best way to get a bomb onboard a US-bound airliner is to have a young muslim man whose name already appears on a government terrorist watch-list show up just prior to departure with no checked luggage or passport and pay $3000 cash for a one-way ticket to America. Oh, and coincidentally his father had recently appeared at a US Embassy to warn of his son’s radical Islamic tendencies. It almost seems like they were trying to make every mistake in the book to draw attention to Abdulmutallab. I’d say that’s a pretty poor plan. Which makes it all-the–more embarrassing that this mission came precariously close to success. I’m almost surprised that he wasn’t wearing a sign inscribed with TERRORIST in large block letters when boarding the aircraft.
Moving on to the bomb itself, things get even more ridiculous. The explosive in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear was Pentaerythritol, which is a building block for PETN. To make PETN, Pentaerythritol must be mixed with concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids. It is assumed that these acids were in the syringe that the bomber was attempting to inject, under the cover of a blanket, into his underpants. He then attempted to ignite the newly prepared PETN with some kind of a fuse. He was apparently unaware that PETN requires a shock wave rather than heat or flame to detonate, and a shock wave is best provided by an initiator explosive. Somehow, I would expect an Al-Qaida operative to have had more explosives knowledge than this before being sent on a mission. Especially when we consider how much training and planning went into the 9-11 attacks.
Abdulmutallab is reported to have proudly boasted to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “I am one from a production line of terrorists that has been trained in Yemen by al-Qaeda. There are more just like me who will strike soon.” An ominous warning of more to come. It didn’t even take waterboarding to extract this information from the more-than-willing-to-talk would-be terrorist. Or perhaps it was just an effort to make sure our attention stays on airline security.
In short, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the beginning. It almost seems that this attack must have been a diversion to get us to focus exclusively on airline safety. Abdulmutallab was supposed to fail. He wasn’t aware of that aspect of the plan, but his Al-Qaida superiors had set him up to fail, to purposely get caught by air security as a grand diversion. They probably figured that if he did happen to get through to attempt the attack then that was an unlikely bonus, but the diversion of our attention would still be accomplished with or without a successful explosion. Why the diversion? To attack us somewhere or somehow else, while our attention is on air travel safety. Perhaps, Al Qaida means to attack us elsewhere using a method that does not involve the airline industry. Hopefully, our government recognizes the use of diversion as a tactic, since they often employ this same tactic themselves. When it comes to terrorism we face the unknown. Where and in what form will the attack take place? Scanning luggage, taking our shoes off, pat-downs, and x-ray vision do nothing to solve the problem, although paying attention to the obvious might help. We can only protect against those methods of which we are aware or can imagine. The real danger lies in the unknown.
