Find The Boots

Unless you were living under a rock this past week, you've heard about the JFK terror plot. Time has a few choice quotes:

Three men were arrested and one was being sought in Trinidad on Saturday. In an indictment charging the four men, one of them is quoted as saying the foiled plot would "cause greater destruction than in the Sept. 11 attacks," destroying the airport, killing several thousand people and destroying parts of Queens, where the line runs underground.

One of the suspects, Russell Defreitas, a U.S. citizen native to Guyana and former JFK employee, said the airport was a symbol that would put "the whole country in mourning."

My first take when I heard the news was "Wow, that's going to be a mess. I'll guess I'll have to connect through IAD or BOS on my next trip over the pond." JFK airport is hardly the symbol of the United States. Heck, most of us don't even like airports. And aside from the experience Tom Hanks had in The Terminal, JFK isn't a real warm and fuzzy place. You only have to change terminals outside in the sleet once to be sick of that place.

They think they're attacking our symbols and they have no idea what our symbols even are. I'd have been a lot more upset if they had blown up the Lincoln Memorial or turned off the power for the East Coast for a couple of weeks in the summer.

My second take was that I didn't think they would do much damage. I've actually done some work in that industry, and pipelines don't turn into giant bombs when you break them. The pumps shut down, the fuel is used up, and then there's a big mess to clean up. But getting even a huge fuel tank of jet fuel to explode is pretty hard to do. Regardless of what the moonbats say, just shooting at the tank with a .50 cal with tracer won't set it off.

And finally, I breathed a sigh of relief that these guys don't know what they're doing. I can think of 50 things off the top of my head that would be much more damaging to the American psyche and economy, and they don't require a huge amount of money or extravagant weapons. I'm not going to list any for fear of giving those idiots ideas, but let's just say a lot of them revolve around the unarmed victims zones we've set up.

I'm a lot more concerned that eventually they'll sneak some nukes into the country and light up a couple of cities. I don't believe the rumors going around that say they already had them here, because there's no way those idiots could show that much discipline. They'd have already used them if they had them.

Heaven help the muslim world if they ever do, because even if we've got a left winger in the White House the pressure to retaliate will be so immense that Tehran, Damascus, and perhaps even Jedda won't survive the day. We won't be making distinctions between moderates and fanatics. The rest of the world seems to forget from time to time that we're as capable of doing horrible things as the best of them.

But I'm really not too concerned about it, because that type of plot requires the resources of nation states and a huge amount of coordination. And the fact that the good guys are picking up the small fry like these and the Ft. Dix group indicates to me that they'd catch anything that was really big.

One last conspiracy theory. Are we catching more of these plots, or is the press just being told about the plots? I think the Bush Administration made the decision post 9/11 to keep news of plots they had foiled quiet. They wanted to go into 2004 and be able to say "Nothing has happened, our plan is working." Then they lost the Congress because many Americans became convinced by the Dems that the Global War on Terror isn't all that. So now we're finding out about plots. It's been going on all along, we just get press coverage now.