Navel intelligence

The latest attempted plane bombing caught my interest because of the way perception seems to trump reality in our media-saturated age.

It wouldn't be surprising if holiday travel to the CNMI takes a hit. One incident on one of the thousands of daily flights can do that. Airline travel is ridiculously safe, particularly immediately after an incident like this, but who cares about statistics?

The system worked, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano reportedly said. With all due respect... no. (UPDATE: she agrees) Her unspoken assumption is that the system can work all of the time, every where. That's a very American assumption: if we throw billions of dollars at a problem it will go away.

It won't. We can, and have, added multiple layers of security. They work very well and they can undoubtedly work better. Not perfectly, though. Sorry.

Realistically, it's been eight years since Richard Reid the shoe bomber. Both men used very small amounts of a high explosive-- and failed. We've been very lucky. There are thousands of fanatics out there and they are going to keep trying.

Let the hand-wringing begin

'What went wrong?' the politicians are howling as they put on television make-up and schedule hearings, meaning 'who can we blame?'

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was on the lowest-level database, evidently because there was 'insufficient derogatory information' to classify him higher. Supposedly his father told the American Embassy his son had extremist views. That's it-- though maybe he followed up with emails that ended up in the spam folder with other Nigerian bankers.

Seriously, Abdulmutallab probably would have earned more suspicion if there had been other factoids about him. We simply don't have the resources to investigate more than 500,000 'suspicious' people. The reports I've read say that even now, authorities are still checking out his claim of a Yemeni connection, possibly to Al Qaeda.

Degrees of separation

That Yemeni link intrigues me: evidently the poor little rich kid's mother is from Yemen and he says he studied with a radical internet cleric there. The Detroit area is home to a large number of Yemenis (and Moslems) and there have just been two air strikes against radicals in that country.

One of the targets in the second strike was a former Guantanamo detainee who went through the highly-touted Saudi Arabian 're-education' program for radicals-- he is one of the few recidivists to-date. Since almost half of the remaining prisoners are from Yemen, that's a monkey wrench in plans to close Gitmo.

Honestly, I probably wouldn't have bothered reading the Washington Post and New York Times articles on the second bombing if their lead sentences hadn't pissed me off by referring to the "suspect in the Fort Hood shootings". Innocent until proven guilty, sure, but what a namby-pamby politically correct way of putting it.

Mostly, I'm concerned that we're drawing closer to a semi-free failing state that tortures its opposition, locks up its journalists and appears to survive because the majority of the population is in a self-medicated khat-chewing stupor.

Humor us

I need a break from constant power outages. Enter CNN, of all things, in a throwaway line at the end of a story.

It seems former Osama bin Laden driver Salim Ahmed Hamden is facing a life sentence if he loses --and detention until the end of the War On Terror if he wins-- in his Guantanamo trial. He's been classified as an "enemy combatant". Now he knows a little more about the U.S. military: Catch 22.

Yeah, it's mean, especially because I'm chuckling, but I reluctantly have to agree in this case. Am I inconsistent? You bet!

A quick check and I ended up with a Wired blog. Interesting, but nothing to get me out of my funk.

Ah, but there was a link to God Destroys Boise for Not Being Gay Enough. Hey, at least those malware bozos are starting to provide entertainment in exchange for installing their trojans.

Oh, CNN wasn't done. They also reported that researchers "discovered" another 125,000 lowland gorillas. That's something like discovering America, but good news after all of the dire predictions of their demise I've been reading. Here's a New York Times take.

I wanted to say something about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn yesterday, but everything I wrote between outages came out ponderous and preachy; something close to his political and social views. It's that black (heh) CUC mood.

But I enjoyed, if that's the word, his early books. I do wonder if I would feel the same today. Maybe Cancer Ward would hold up or The First Circle, which I haven't read. I doubt I could wade through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or The Gulag Archipelago any more.

He was an important writer during his fifteen minutes and some still think he was one of the best writers of the 20th century. I don't doubt his courage in exposing the Soviet system and its labor camps. Let's hope countries like Iran and China will be lucky enough to produce a similar voice.

Complicated, great and imperfect like a figure in Greek tragedy, he died Sunday.