Word: terrorists
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There's a scene in the video game 24, based on the popular television show, in which the player takes on the role of government agent Jack Bauer and tortures a terrorist. To extract a set of codes, Bauer shoots the man in the gut, slams his head on the table, refuses to call a doctor, and places his pistol against his victim's head...
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...
...even if Abdulmutallab had succeeded in blowing up Northwest Flight 253, he would have killed only one-tenth as many people as died on 9/11. Yes, using the 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...
...heads of the intelligence agencies admitted to a string of mistakes that brought Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab within a fortuitous malfunction of blowing up Flight 253 over Detroit. The National Security Agency had known from an intercept in Yemen that al-Qaeda had recruited a Nigerian to carry out a terrorist attack; another intercept had suggested some sort of attack around Christmas. The State Department had learned from the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, that the son of a prominent Nigerian banker had joined extremists in Yemen. The CIA had even produced a background report on Abdulmutallab. All this information...