Goose Creek- Bombers or Maroons?
Friday, August 31, 2007
The two men arrested near the Naval brig at Goose Creek are facing serious charges. The apologists began immediately explaining away the items in their car as fireworks. That was a very dumb explanation and would have meant the two men were basically fools. If your name is Ahmed Mohammed and your buddy is Youssef Megahed (Clark AFB ref anyone?) and you are driving around the US with a bunch of illegal fireworks you are a fool. It doesn't take much racial profiling to throw a flag on that play. Now as it turns out what they had was not fireworks but pipe-bombs and related accoutrements. Mohamed is charged with teaching how to make bombs, but we don't know who he taught, if it was his buddy or if it spreads wider than that.
Either way I can find no way to classify the two as anything but bombers or maroons. If they thought that a couple of young Muslim men be-bopping across the country occasionally blowing off steam by cranking off a couple of pipe bombs would be written of as youthful pranks, then they are maroons. Barring that they are bombers, that thought should not give you a warm fuzzy. We live in an unsecured country, and I mean less our lack of border control, than our open, unscrutinized existence. We can't even discuss a national ID card because women and minorities are too oppressed to get one, not to mention all our nudge, nudge, wink wink guest workers.
I have a piece I will polish up over the weekend stating what should be obvious, we will not and can not actually secure this country, period. That is why our efforts to kill or interdict them overseas are so vital. We have too many soft targets in this country. Just count the number of malls, stadiums and govt. buildings where you live. We will never be able to guard our insecurities. And even if we fenced our border to the South, does anyone really think we'll do the same up North. And even if we did, our student visa programs let in tens of thousands of young men from countries that historically provide terrorists.
I will see if I can come up with any solutions or positive notes about this, but really it points out vividly how much work we have to do in the spying and tango whacking portions of our game.
Bombing Maroons on the left, innocent men fascinated by ferrys in Seattle. Hmmm, minus the beards.......maybe?