Musings on the Times Square Bombing Attempt

It seems to me that this attack was beyond amateurish and crossed the line into inept; especially when it came to both trying to detonate the bomb and covering up the tracks. Any reasonably intelligent 13 year old could build a decent pipe bomb as a detonating device. And anyone who has done a few milliseconds worth of research into either the first WTC bombing in `95 of the OKC bombing in `95 would know that you have to saturate the fertilizer[1] with fuel oil (or gasoline) and that VIN numbers are stamped on things that are likely to withstand the vehicle being blown up.

So that leads me to one of two possibilities:

First, al Qaeda is drawing from the really shallow end of the talent pool. If Paki-McVeigh indeed went to bomb-making school, he must have slept through all of the classes.

Second, carrying out non-deadly and seemingly retarded attacks might be what al Qaeda has in mind. The US has shown that if sufficiently provoked, it can cause enormous damage to al Qaeda and its supporters. Given that the House of Saud's family of American butt-monkeys no longer controls the White House, a spectacularly successful attack might cause the US to become interested in making like difficult (or shorter) for some Saudis who have been supporting and financing al Qaeda.

A failed attack sheds little blood, does no damage, and yet causes the US and others to engage in further acts of useless security theater, which serves to both increase costs to the American people and to piss off people, especially Muslims who are just going about their daily business. Tales of the latter tend to work against our interests in the propaganda struggle between the US and al Qaeda.

And that might be just what they are trying to achieve.

[1]I'll bet that the "fertilizer" that they supposedly found wasn't the ammonium nitrate kind.