you have a very nice blog and very informative article…

Rightwinged,

I disagree. Shooting people at random is a Crazy White Guy crime. Black people just don’t do it, as a rule. Blacks don’t do serial killings either, as a rule. The Washington Snipers were an exception to that rule. If you go with the percentages, as the profilers did, your best bet was to guess they were white. That guess filled the media for weeks before they got a lead on the perps who turned out to be black and nominally Muslim, at least.

Tantor on June 3, 2007 at 4:29 PM

You missed my entire point Tantor. Profiling is a legitimate law enforcement technique, and WE NEED TO BE USING IT. If someone is named Abdul, I want them being scrutinized over my grandmother. The point being, we didn’t throw a fit when criminal profilers insisted the DC snipers were middle aged angry white males, because that is what the imperfect science of profile lead them to believe. My point was, it was perfectly acceptable and there were no protests over it, but we aren’t allowed to profile if the profile will lead us to be searching for someone who is part of a minority group.

So I’m not even saying that the profiling wasn’t right to do, even though they couldn’t have been more wrong, the point I was making was about the hypocrisy of people when it comes to accepted and unacceptable profiling. Black Muslims murdering random people in DC? “We think it’s a white guy”. Then you’ve got black criminals on the loose in DC, and you have the Washington Post writing stories where they describe them to a T, except they neglect to mention their race (even though it’s known, they aren’t just John Does). Basically what I’m saying is “we’re f**ked” if this is how we’re going to fight crime and terrorism. Law enforcement isn’t allowed to do it, so we all should – If you see someone who looks Middle Eastern or Muslim in any way, keep an eye on them. I really don’t care if anyone has a problem with that, it’s necessary.

I disagree. Shooting people at random is a Crazy White Guy crime. Black people just don’t do it, as a rule. Blacks don’t do serial killings either, as a rule. The Washington Snipers were an exception to that rule. If you go with the percentages, as the profilers did, your best bet was to guess they were white. That guess filled the media for weeks before they got a lead on the perps who turned out to be black and nominally Muslim, at least.

Technological savvy is hardly necessary to succeed as a terrorist. The two snipers who were gunning down random people around Washington, DC five years ago were not technological geniuses and they terrorized this city. Their technological innovation amounted to cutting a hole in the trunk of a car so they could fire through it. I can tell you that people here were scared to send their kids to school, to go to the gas station, to have outdoor festivals.

Tantor on June 3, 2007 at 10:24 AM

I know this has nothing to do with the argument you’re having, but I feel the need to point this out every time the Beltway Snipers are brought up… Remember how criminal profilers made them out to be middle aged white men? (YEAH, WE PROFILE… IT’S JUST NOT ALLOWED WHEN IT’S ACCURATE AND THE PERP IS OF ANY MINORITY GROUP). And what did they turn out to be? BLACK MUSLIMS!!! I’m still so irritated that this was completely downplayed. I suspect if you were to do a poll of the general public, you’d be lucky if 20% knew that those 2 were Muslims. But the profiling point is extremely important too. Where white leaders organizing protests against evil police departments for profiling when they told us they were looking for middle aged white men? No. And the worst part is, THEY WERE WRONG! And we still didn’t throw a fit. Where as you have minorities, getting out of trouble for things they’ve actually done by throwing around the profiling race card.

doriangrey

I don’t think I said anything about treating Islamic fundamentalism as a police matter, nor did I say anything about going on the defense. What I’m saying is that this specific plot was stupid.

The Muslim terrorists making war on us are incompetent boobs for the most part, lots of bloodthirsty enthusiasm combined with few brains. The first collection of plotters against the World Trade Center were a bunch of clueless cab drivers and pizza deliverymen who couldn’t figure out how to make a bomb until Ramzi Yousef showed up out of nowhere with the brains and organization to get things done.

Most Al Qaeda plots failed out of sheer incompetence. These plots were pretty simple: build a big bomb, drive it to where the infidels are, set it off. The bumble-footed Muslim haters couldn’t even manage this most of the time because these are not people who can get a job done. The Muslim jihad is a war of the incompetent and dysfunctional against the competent and successful.

There is no defensive fortification that cannot and will not eventually be destroyed by an enemy with the patience and resources required. A purely defensive strategy is always a suicidal strategy.

Tantor on June 2, 2007 at 8:29 PM

Let me add some other things else that JaHerer22 is obviously missing. His argument is based on the notion that somehow the law enforcement side is more successful than the military side (at least in respect to Iraq). When he cites the London plot that was foiled by British government, he fails to acknowledge that their laws allow them much more intrusive police powers than anything we’d imagine doing (until we’re attacked again). Their police are allowed a genuine domestic surveillance program and they are not limited by posse comitatus.

A fatal error in his reasoning, though, is that he is trying to separate the law enforcement aspects from the military aspects. Although this is an interesting academic exercise, it does not reflect reality. Our counter-terrorism effort are holistic. They take into account military, economic, diplomatic, and law enforcement efforts. Furthermore, due to security, we are not privy to all of the successes of each of these efforts. Nor to how intertwined they are. For example, we know that we got intelligence from Afghanistan and Iraq. How much of that have we used to break up terrorist plots? How much was filtered and shared with the FBI or local law enforcement to prevent attacks? We don’t know. We can really only argue over whether the overall strategy of counter-terrorism is working. Most people agree, it has (so far).

One law enforcement official played down Mr. Defreitas’s skills as a terrorist, calling him “a sad sack” and “not a Grade A terrorist.”

Just a disgruntled former employee. Nothing to see here, move along.

Officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com that they heard repeated references to “Adnan” during the extensive wiretaps conducted on the suspects’ telephone conversations, including calls to Guyana and Trinidad…

Screw you Bush! Keep your patriot act and secret police off of us, we have privacy rights! I’d rather have people die in a terrorist attack than you listen in on their phone calls!

~The American Left

Krydor on June 2, 2007 at 10:12 PM

hard to say if it was a bad plan. What it was was bad execution. They recruited an FBI informant. If they hadn’t, who knows what could have happened. It’s unclear if anything raised suspicions before the informant was recruited.

A plot to potentially destroy one of New York’s leading airports has been thwarted…

I’ve read the indictment of the JFK bombers (pdf here) and it really looks like there were two groups involved. The first was a Guyanan group run by a shady businessman identified as “Individual E” whose philanthropic adventures include deferring……

To argue as to if their plan was good or not is exactly the mindset that said that a handful of people with box cutters couldn’t hijack an airplane and fly it into a building full of people

The thing about September 11th is that is was an extremely good plan. There’s a book I have next to me called “Target: The West” written in 1993 by Yossef Bodansky. He was part of the US inquiry into the 1993 WTC bombing. He called the whole hijacking of planes to be used as missiles deal back then. Page 15 of the paperback edition, actually.

So, they had a good plan, did it on the cheap and exploited gaping holes in security. This plan is a bad plan, involving suspicious travel and trying to get through tight security. I think we’ll see amusement park bombings before we see a successful massive explosion at an airport fuel dump.