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Here's a fact about the underwear attack that you might have missed in the media shoutfest: it failed. It failed, first of all, because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was just one terrorist. Once upon a time, al-Qaeda's modus operandi was to launch multiple, simultaneous attacks. That way, even if one attack failed, the entire operation wouldn't. On 9/11, the network deployed 19 hijackers on four planes; on 12/25, by contrast, it managed only one. Second, the underwear attack failed because Abdulmutallab wasn't particularly well trained. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were personally selected by Osama...
...word only is ghoulish when you're talking about hundreds of lives. But after Sept. 11, George W. Bush warned about terrorists killing "hundreds of thousands of innocent people" in "a day of horror like none we have ever known." The conventional wisdom was that the next terrorist attack would not merely equal 9/11 but be worse. (See a special report on where the accused 9/11 plotters...
...fact, terrorists have not pulled off another attack on the scale of 9/11 anywhere in the world. A 2007 study by Canada's Simon Fraser University found the global death toll from terrorist attacks has substantially decreased since 2001. While al-Qaeda plots do sometimes succeed - like the double-agent operation that killed seven CIA officers in Afghanistan last month - they have become, Rand terrorism expert Brian Jenkins points out, less frequent and less potent...
...meantime, the U.S. has been pounding it with missiles. A pair of missiles hit a house in the Mishta area of South Waziristan on Friday, the 10th such attack in roughly two weeks in Pakistan's tribal belt bordering Afghanistan. Two intelligence officials told The Associated Press that the two people killed were suspected militants. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not have the authority to make such disclosures to the press...
Under the 28-year-old's watch, militant attacks in Pakistan have soared since October, even as the army has waged an offensive against the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan tribal region. Mehsud also appeared on a recent video with the Jordanian militant who killed seven CIA employees in a December suicide attack in Afghanistan...