I was a bit startled to see the headline “If bin Laden is found, he’ll be killed, Holder says” appearing at the Washington Post (via Memeorandum). It appears to be sensationalistic, however:

Osama bin Laden “will never appear in an American courtroom,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told House members at a hearing Tuesday.  “Let’s deal with the reality here,” Holder said in response to questions from Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.). “The reality is, we will be reading Miranda rights to a corpse.”

Members of an Appropriations subcommittee pressed Holder about the Justice Department’s response to the failed Christmas Day bombing plot and the abortive decision to try in Lower Manhattan the alleged masterminds of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

He grew most heated, however, amid GOP attacks over the hypothetical capture of bin Laden. No law enforcement response would be necessary, he said, because “he will be killed by us or by his own people.”

It seems to me that Holder is merely making a prediction, not stating the public policy of the Obama administration.  That is, we presume that Osama would rather be a martyr than be taken prisoner.   Further, we presume that Osama’s cronies have the same preference.

Conversely, while I’m sure the members of the special forces or intelligence team with the opportunity to shoot or capture Osama would very much enjoy pulling the trigger, that they’d much rather have the intelligence and propaganda value of dragging the Big Cheese in.

UPDATE (Dave Schuler): I have corrected a typographical error in the final sentence.

UPDATE (James Joyner): Oops.  I actually made the Obama/Osama typo twice in the post and caught the first instance.  Nothing nefarious intended:  While I typed “Osama” very frequently in the early years of the blog, I now type “Obama” several times and day, so my brain’s just rewired to do it automatically.

A psychiatrist says John Patrick Bedell tried to self-medicate his bipolar illness with marijuana, inadvertently making his symptoms more pronounced. (Washoe County Jail via AP)

It appears that a counterintuitive meme is spreading:  John Patrick Bedell, who was killed while he opened fire at the Pentagon Metro stop, was a right-wing extemist.

So says Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Grier, in a piece subtlety headlined “John Patrick Bedell: Did right-wing extremism lead to shooting?”

John Patrick Bedell, whom authorities identified as the gunman in the Pentagon shooting on Thursday, appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings.

If so, that would make the Pentagon shooting the second violent extremist attack on a federal building within the past month. On Feb. 18, Joseph Stack flew a small aircraft into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. Mr. Stack left behind a disjointed screed in which, among other things, he expressed his hatred of the government.

Details of Mr. Bedell’s case are still emerging. But writings by someone with his same name and birth date, posted on the Internet, express ill will toward the government and the armed forces and question whether Washington itself might have been behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Think Progress‘ Alex Seitz-Wald (”Pentagon Shooter Was Right-Wing, Anti-Government Terrorist“), TPM’s Zachary Roth (”Pentagon Shooter Worshipped Private Property Rights, Denounced Government ‘Schemes’ Like Public Education“), and C&L’s David Neiwert (”‘Lone wolf’ anti-government extremist opens fire at the Pentagon. But let’s not call it terrorism.”) dutifully pass the meme along.

The evidence is starting to look pretty persuasive, given other details that are emerging, that the Internet postings in question are indeed from the same J. Patrick Bedell.  It’s true that Bedell harbored a bizarre array of political beliefs, some of which are from the extreme right, some from the extreme left, and some from an extreme libertarian/anarchist view.  But, to the extent that his attack on the Pentagon was political — much less an act of terrorism — it was motivated by 9/11 Trutherism.  That ain’t right-wing.

Naturally, this argument has roiled the blogosphere, largely along predictable lines.

• Michelle Malkin points out Bedell was a registered Democrat, hated Bush, etc.

• Whiskey Fire’s Ther argues that Bedell’s anti-Vietnam and anti-Iraq War rants make him right-wing.  No, really.

• Bruce McQuain says Bedell’s rants remind him of 1960s radicals like Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army.

• Jim Hoft contends “The Pentagon shooter is linked to several gay rights groups along with PETA, NPR, various drug legalization orgs, Greenpeace and Al Franken.”

• Melissa Clouthier charges, “It’s the Democrats that embrace that conspiracy theory…them and the Ron Paul folks..”

• Stacy McCain takes it all in stride in what one presumes is an ironic essay pinning the blame on Bedell’s use of marijuana and attendance at grad school.

• AllahPundit observes, “If there’s any silver lining in the very dark clouds created by Bedell and Joe Stack (and even the Kentucky census worker fiasco), it may be that partisans on both sides have necessarily become more cautious about trying to divine coherent motives from incoherent minds.”

• After venting against the Left and Right in a way unquotable on a family blog, Dennis the Peasant observes, “What seems clear is that Bedell was more disturbed than anything else. But since one of the newest games in town is to force the actions of obviously disturbed individuals into a useful political context, everyone ignores the obvious fact that sometimes it’s as simple as crazy people doing something crazy.”

• Writing from the left, Steve M. correctly notes the complicated nature of Bedell’s beliefs can’t reasonably characterized along any pole.   Indeed, “It seems to me that a lot of the political violence we’re seeing lately is from people who are enraged, and have been for a long time, but who don’t quite feel represented by any of the groups who dominate our political debate.”

Also, I’d add, they were clinically insane.  Ironically, left-leaning MSNBC (”Pentagon shooter had history of mental illness“) gets it right:

The California man who was killed in a shootout with Pentagon police had a history of mental illness and had become so erratic that his parents reached out to local authorities weeks ago with a warning that he was unstable and might have a gun, authorities said Friday.

It’s still unclear why John Patrick Bedell opened fire Thursday at the Pentagon entrance, wounding two police officers before he was fatally shot. The two officers were hospitalized briefly with minor injuries.

Bedell was diagnosed as bipolar, or manic depressive, and had been in and out of treatment programs for years. His psychiatrist, J. Michael Nelson, said Bedell tried to self-medicate with marijuana, inadvertently making his symptoms more pronounced.

Can we please stop with the political name-calling whenever one of these nuts goes off?

Look, we’re a big country.  There are over 300 million of us.  Almost everyone holds a position or two that’s way off the charts and a whole lot of people believe in 9/11 Trutherism, black helicopters, and all the rest.  Less than a handful of those people are out trying to kill people.    However stupid or loathesome a political view may be, the fact that some nut also holds it adds nothing to the counter-argument.

An FBI mobile command center vehicle is parked outside the Pentagon after a man with a gun opened fire at the Pentagon metro stop in Washington, Thursday, March 4, 2010. A gunman coolly drew a weapon from his pocket and opened fire at the teeming subway entrance to the Pentagon complex, wounding two police officers before being shot and critically wounded, officials said. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

It seems that John Patrick Bedell, who died from wounds received while shooting two policemen at the Pentagon Metro stop last evening, is, in the words of Patrick Frey,  “a 9/11 Truther and an anti-Bush nut case.”

Matt Apuzzo and Devlin Barrett for AP:

A California man killed in a shootout with Pentagon police drove cross-country and arrived at the military headquarters’ subway entrance armed with two semiautomatic weapons, authorities said Friday. The shooter apparently left behind Internet postings resentful of the government and airing suspicions about the 9/11 attacks.

John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., was named as the gunman in the Thursday evening attack. Authorities said he’d had previous run-ins with the law.

Investigators have found no immediate connection to terrorism, and the attack that superficially wounded two police officers at the massive Defense Department headquarters appears to be a case of “a single individual who had issues,” Richard Keevill, chief of Pentagon police, said in an early morning press conference Friday.

Keevill described Bedell as “very well-educated” and well-dressed, saying Bedell was wearing a suit when he showed up at the secure Pentagon entrance about 6:40 p.m. and blended in with workers. He was concealing two 9 millimeter semiautomatic weapons and “many magazines” of ammunition.

[...]

In an Internet posting, a user by the name JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover up. Sabow’s family has maintained that he was murdered because he was about to expose covert military operations in Central America involving drug smuggling.

Keevill said Friday that authorities had not made “a final determination” that the shooter was the same Bedell.

The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”

That same posting railed against the government’s enforcement of marijuana laws and included links to the author’s 2006 court case in Orange County, Calif., involving allegations of cultivating marijuana and resisting a police officer. Court records available online show the date of birth on the case mentioned by the user JPatrickBedell matches that of the John Patrick Bedell suspected in the shooting.

Presuming that they’re the same guy, this raises a question that we seem to be asking repeatedly these days:  Does a politically motivated nutjob acting alone qualify as a terrorist?  Or is it just a one-off tragedy?   As Apuzzo and Barrett note, we’re asking that too much of late:

The assault at the very threshold of the Pentagon — the U.S. capital’s ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001 — came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, post allegedly by a U.S. Army psychiatrist with radical Islamic leanings.

Hatred of the government motivated a man in Texas last month to fly a small plane into a building housing Internal Revenue Service offices, killing an IRS employee and himself.

The shooting resembled one in January in which a gunman walked up to the security entrance of a Las Vegas courthouse and opened fire with a shotgun, killing one officer and wounding another before being gunned down in a barrage of return fire.

We’ve got wannabe Islamists, rightwing nuts, and leftwing nuts in the mix.  I’ve generally dismissed all of them as sad cases that don’t deserve to be considered “terrorism” in the same way as organized plots by standing groups.  I’ve changed by assessment as to the Hasan attack at Fort Hood given that he does seem to have been at least trying to work with al Qaeda or associated groups.

(As an aside: Can journalists please stop adding the descriptor “semi-automatic” when referring to 9mm handguns?  It’s all but redundant and gives the wrong impression as to what we’re dealing with, since the media have convinced Americans that “semi-automatic” is synonymous with “machine gun.”)

As everyone’s heard by now, a man named Joe Stack crashes his small airplane into a building in Austin this morning, thankfully killing only himself.

Fox News reports:

A pilot furious with the Internal Revenue Service crashed his small plane Thursday into an office building in Austin, Texas, that houses federal tax employees, setting off a raging fire.

Officials are investigating whether the pilot, identified by authorities as Joseph Andrew Stack, a 53-year-old software engineer who lived in Texas, crashed the plane intentionally. Stack was confirmed dead.

The crash was almost certainly intentional, we now know.  Indeed, he left an online “manifesto” explaining why he was doing what he did.

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

It goes on like that for a piece but you get the idea.

While some are dubbing Stack a rightwing nut, Michael Tomasky correctly notes that Stack was “neither right nor left.”  He explains, “Stack was in fact angry at everyone. Angry at the IRS. Angry at the government generally. Angry at unions. But also angry at corporate greed and at rich people and at ‘thugs and plunderers’ of various stripe.”  It sounds like he was just at wit’s end and looking for someone to blame — and finding plenty of likely suspects.

A related question is whether Stack was a terrorist.

The safe answer is Tomasky’s:  “Does that make him a terrorist? It’s an interesting question. Was he trying to create terror among the citizenry? We don’t know yet.”

Many left-of-center folks I follow on Twitter think so.  Matt Yglesias captures the sentiment best, quipping, “Politically motivated violence undertaken by non-Muslims isn’t terrorism, everyone knows that!”

But calling anyone who both has a political beef and goes off violently a “terrorist” seems to render it a word with no special meaning.  Most accepted definitions of the term include some sort of action-oriented objective. Specifically, the instilling of fear in the general public in hopes that it leads to political change.

What is it that Stack thought he was going to achieve?  Presumably, the news that an airplane was crashing into a building inspired some short-lived terror.   But unlike, say, the 9/11 attacks, there’s not much reason to think that there will be follow-on attacks since this appears to be a “cell” of one and the supply would seem exhausted.

This just seems like some poor nut who got frustrated and wanted his suicide to generate some notice.

(Oh: And I would advise against searching for images of “Joe Stack” at this time.  Trust me.)

UPDATE: C&L’s David Neiwert notes that the Department of Homeland Security has pronounced that “there’s no nexus with terrorist activity” and argues,

Well, this is true only if the conventional understanding of the word “terrorism” has now been narrowed down to mean only international terrorism and to preclude domestic terrorism altogether.

Since when, after all, is attempting to blow up a federal office as a protest against federal policies NOT an act of domestic terrorism?

You know, Timothy McVeigh used a “dangerous instrument” to kill 168 people in Oklahoma City. He too was angry at the federal government, and was converted to the belief that acts of violence was the only means possible to prevent the government from overwhelming our freedom and replacing it with tyranny. He also believed that his act of exemplary violence would inspire others to take up similar acts to stave off the threat of tyranny.

[...]

There are different kinds terrorism, to be certain. There’s international terrorism. Then there’s domestic terrorism, sometimes conducted by a larger conspiracy, and sometimes conducted by small cells like McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and lone wolves like Eric Rudolph, Scott Roeder and James Von Brunn.

That’s all true.  But that still doesn’t make every act of violence committed by someone angry at the government “terrorism.”  Who, exactly, was Stack trying to terrorize? What did he think he was going to accomplish?

McVeigh was a terrorist, without question, even though his act of mass murder had no significant chance of achieving his political aims.  Ditto, for that matter, the 9/11 attacks; just because al Qaeda’s goals are absurd doesn’t mean they’re not systematically trying to achieve them with violence.   But both plots created significant public terror and were at least highly organized toward achieving aims.   As best we call tell from early evidence, Stack was just mad as hell and hoping to draw attention to his “manifesto.”

UPDATE 2:   Glenn Greenwald and Mark Safranski have longish, perfectly reasonable, essays arguing that of course Stack is a terrorist.  I commend them to you.  We agree on the facts; it’s basically a semantic discussion at this point.

Greenwald, Yglesias, and others are contending that the reluctance to call Stack a terrorist stems mostly from the fact that he’s not a Muslim.  As for myself, longtime readers will note that I’ve quite frequently argued that individual Muslims who go on killing or mayhem sprees are mostly nuts rather than bonafide terrorists.  I tend to use the word sparingly, reserving it for those who can plausibly do real damage, actually inspire terror, and have some plausible hope that their actions will result in desired policy changes.  But I concede that drawing the line can be arbitrary.

Remember that report from a few weeks back that President Obama was targeting American citizens accused of terrorism for assassination by U.S. intelligence and special operators?  Well, it’s  not quite true.

Steve Aftergood:

“The article referred incorrectly to the presence of U.S. citizens on a CIA list of people the agency seeks to kill or capture,” the Washington Post said in a correction published in the February 12 edition.  “After The Post’s report was published, a source said that a statement the source made about the CIA list was misunderstood. Additional reporting produced no independent confirmation of the original report, and a CIA spokesman said that The Post’s account of the list was incorrect. The military’s Joint Special Operations Command maintains a target list that includes several Americans. In recent weeks, U.S. officials have said that the government is prepared to kill U.S. citizens who are believed to be involved in terrorist activities that threaten Americans.”

The correction has been appended to the online version of the article.

On February 3, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair testified to his view that U.S. government agencies may use lethal force against U.S. citizens who are involved in terrorist activities.  “We don’t target people for free speech,” he said. “We target them for taking action that threatens Americans.”

I know I feel better.

Where should we point the fingers for our current fiscal/economic mess? Keith Hennessey has a post that I tend to agree with. Hennessey looks at the opening statements from President Obama on his new budget,

The fact is, 10 years ago, we had a budget surplus of more than $200 billion, with projected surpluses stretching out toward the horizon. Yet over the course of the past 10 years, the previous administration and previous Congresses created an expensive new drug program, passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and funded two wars without paying for any of it -– all of which was compounded by recession and by rising health care costs. As a result, when I first walked through the door, the deficit stood at $1.3 trillion, with projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade.

Hennessey has a fairly long list of responses to this, but I want to try and keep this post somewhat short. Obama lists a number of reasons why the current problems we face aren’t his fault,

Medicare Drug Program
Tax Cuts
Iraq and Afghanistan
Recession (2 of them actually)

Now, how many of these are “Bush’s fault”? I’d say the first 3 can be partly blamed on Bush. But let us consider what Team Obama is going to do:

Medicare Drug Program—Keep it
Tax Cuts—Keep Most of them
Iraq and Afghanistan—Continue Bush’s policies.

Huh. Not all that much change if you ask me. What was Candidate Obama’s campaign slogan again?

And to be fair, if the Democrats were in charge during the Medicare Drug Program we’d have an even larger program than we do now. And regarding Iraq and Aghanistan, I’ve seen the claim that Obama’s first term could be considered Bush’s third term. So, even though Obama, ostensibly, could take different policy positions on several of things he claims are responsible for our current plight…he doesn’t.

American special operators and intel types are teaming up with Yemeni forces to kill bad guys there, Dana Priest reports.  But Glenn Greenwald is most interested in the third paragraph:

As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said.

Priest gives some more background toward the end of the long piece:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests,” said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.”

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called “High Value Targets” and “High Value Individuals,” whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.

Greenwald is outraged by this:

Just think about this for a minute.  Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”  They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations.  Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years.  That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution.  Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?

He anticipates the obvious retort:

Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens.  That’s just the essence of war.  That’s why it’s permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they’re captured and helplessly detained.

Fair enough. But, he continues:

But combat is not what we’re talking about here.  The people on this “hit list” are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities.  More critically still, the Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — defines the “battlefield” as the entire world.  So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks.  That’s quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

Drawing the line is difficult, indeed.  Most obviously, if said accused terrorist were located within the borders of the United States, it would be clearly illegal to simply assassinate him. (Provoking him into defending himself by kicking in his door late at night, thus necessitating killing him, would of course be permissible.) But that would be true, I should think, of Osama bin Laden himself, much less an American citizen.

On the other hand, we blow up suspected terrorists — or, even Taliban leaders — in commando raids and drone attacks in places like Pakistan without thinking about it.  Indeed, according to an official quoted in Priest’s report, “There have been more such strikes in the first year of Obama’s administration than in the last three years under President George W. Bush.”  No one seems to be complaining about the president’s authority to do this.  (Many question whether it’s a sound strategy, of course, but that’s a different issue entirely.)

Would it make any difference if the accused terrorist had American citizenship?   I’m not so sure.

Obviously, this is an awesome power and one that could easily be abused.  But it’s not at all clear where the line should be drawn.

Someone claiming to be the reclusive terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, who for all we know now looks like a Spanish Communist, has released a tape claiming credit for the botched Detroit terror plot.

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the Christmas Day airline bombing attempt in Detroit, in a audio message released Sunday, and vowed further attacks on the U.S.

The message suggests that bin Laden wants to show he remains in direct command of al-Qaida’s many branches around the world.

In the short recording carried by the Al-Jazeera Arabic news channel, bin Laden addressed President Barack Obama saying the attack was a message similar to that of Sept. 11 and more attacks against the U.S. would be forthcoming.

“The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of the Sept. 11,” he said.

“America will never dream of security unless we will have it in reality in Palestine,” he added. “God willing, our raids on you will continue as long as your support for the Israelis continues.”

Presuming that Osama is still alive and the tape is genuine, it’s quite interesting that he’s now reduced to bragging about horribly botched operations to bolster his credibility.  It would be funnier, of course, if we weren’t massively overreacting to the plot and further snarling our transportation system and curtailing the liberty of our citizens.

On Friday, the FBI released some “digitally enhanced” photographs to help people visualize what Osama bin Laden might look like today. They both aged his “standard” photo and showed another image of what he might look like if he’s adopted a more Western look to blend in.

I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the story but, like Josh Marshall, “I kind of figured they’d churned it out of some super-expensive, high-tech photo-age-o-matic device we’ve been spending homeland security dollars on.”

Not so much.  According to the Sunday Times:

A MOCKED-UP image of how Osama Bin Laden may look today has been withdrawn by the US State Department after the FBI admitted it was partly based on a photograph of a Spanish MP taken from the internet.

The Photofit image of an older, greying Al-Qaeda leader bore a striking resemblance to the left-wing politician Gaspar Llamazares, a member of Spain’s Communist party and a critic of the US “war on terror”. It turned out Llamazares’s grey hair, jaw line and forehead had been simply cut and pasted from an old campaign photograph by an FBI technician.

Apparently, Spanish Communists don’t have a sense of humor:

Llamazares, former leader of the United Left party, was elected to Spain’s parliament in 2000. He said he would no longer feel safe travelling to the United States. “I was surprised and angered because it’s the most shameless use of a real person to make up the image of a terrorist,” he said. “It’s almost like out of a comedy, if it didn’t deal with matters as serious as Bin Laden and citizens’ security.”

He’s got a point.  On the flip side, though, bin Laden has to be thrilled.  Not only does he get to, once again, make America’s counterterrorism operations look foolish but he got a really nice head of hair out of the deal.   Presuming he’s actually still alive, I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that he’s not sporting a $200 haircut.

Yet another incident aboard Flight 243 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Sources tell Fox 2 that a flight from Amsterdam into Detroit Metropolitan Airport was held on the tarmac after landing because of unruly behavior by some of the passengers.The source says four men from Saudi Arabia were saying something in Arabic that alarmed four on-board Federal Air Marshals. The Marshals speak Arabic. A decision was made to stop the plane on the tarmac away from the passenger terminal and remove the men from the plane. Once the men were removed, the rest of passengers were then taken to the terminal for deboarding.

The Transportation Security Administration says the unruly passengers were interviewed by Customs and Border Protection officials. But the TSA says the passengers were released and no arrests were made.

Delta Air Lines spokeswoman Susan Elliott says the crew of Northwest Flight 243 requested that authorities meet the plane Tuesday after it landed because four passengers didn’t follow their instructions. She says nobody was injured but wouldn’t describe what the passengers were doing.

The first order of business is to change the flight number. After the attempted Christmas terrorist attack, passengers and crew on subsequent iterations of that flight have been understandably jumpy. But while extra vigilance is good up to a point, the modal result will be to have people freaking out any time a passenger or passengers who “look Muslim” do anything that could be deemed remotely suspicious.

That said, in this case, the fact that it was Federal Air Marshals makes me think there was at least reasonable suspicion that something was awry.  It’s almost certainly a case of better safe than sorry.

Kevin Drum takes a look at some recent reports and wonders if there was really enough intelligence to “connect the dots” and prevent the aborted Christmas bombing prior to the attempt.

The Christmas bombing attempt might well turn out to be a serious intelligence failure. But the evidence so far suggests that the only red flags known to U.S. intelligence were (a) a walk-in warning of dubious value from Abdulmutallab’s father, (b) warnings that “a Nigerian” was planning an attack, (c) Abdulmutallab’s recent trip to Yemen, and (d) his lack of checked luggage. That’s not very much.

We should all keep an open mind on this. But the more facts that come out, the less it seems as if the intelligence failure was really that serious. There were only a few vague warnings in the system, not the panoply of blinking red alarms that we’ve been hearing about.

Of course, it’s impossible to know at the moment whether there was more information, but I think that Drum makes a good point here. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we might not be able to be better at counterintelligence operations and gathered more information had things not been different. I don’t think that the government is completely free from blame here.

That said, the real question is: how can we improve our counter-terrorism operations so that we can better separate the wheat from the chaff going forward?

Transportation Security Administration Security Officer Nyamsi Tchapleu looks at images created by a "backscatter" scanner during a demonstration at the Transportation Security Administration's Systems Integration Facility at Ronald Reagan National Airport December 30, 2009 in Arlington, Virginia. Backscatter technology uses low level x-rays to create a two-sided image. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

One refrain we’ve heard lots of since the 9/11 attacks, with an uptick every time there’s a new incidents, is that the United States should get serious about airport security and be more like the Israelis.

FP’s Annie Lowrey recounts a personal trip through the security at Ben Gurion.

Once inside, a team of pleasant airport employees approached me and asked if we could speak for a few minutes. We moved to a table in a gated section. This was the famed Israeli airport security screening. The guards, all neatly dressed and young — most, apparently, are just out of the IDF — spoke perfect English. They questioned me for about 20 minutes, politely and intensely — why I was there, what I had seen, where had I been, who had I met with, where I had stayed. They repeated questions. They took notes. They switched off. One member went through my bag item by item, swabbing and testing for residue. Finally, she led me through a set of doors, and wished me a good flight.

No shoe removal. No lines. No cramped corners. No underpaid, overworked security guards snapping gum. The screening happened with several professional, calm, and unrushed guards standing on the other side of a table from one passenger. Here in the States, it is an angry line of passengers wending before one security agent, often with eyes glued to the bag-screening monitor or a driver’s license. The former feels like scrutiny, the latter feels like a hassle.

Presuming Americans would put up with this level of hassle, scaling it would be problematic, to say the least.   Megan McArdle passes along this analysis from an Israeli:

The Israeli security model is (as noted in the article) more about the passenger than their baggage. This approach is both effective, time-consuming, and “racist”: the profilers have a conversation with each passenger; as I’m an Israeli Jew, I always get the abbreviated treatment — focusing more on where my bags have been since I’ve packed them. As a foreigner, you get a much more in-depth grilling. As a Muslim? They want to know your shoe size, and then a whole ‘nother screener comes over and asks you everything all over again, just to see that you keep your story straight. Like they say in the article, the conversations they have are not so much about what you say as how you say it. The screeners are taught to iterate a few levels deep into your story and see that it doesn’t break down under scrutiny.

[...]

The reality is that there are few enough openings that the program can be selective. I’d say, as a generalization, screeners here possess above-average intelligence, whereas your average TSA screener seems to be a working stiff, blindly following some not-too-complex screening algorithm in a three-ring binder. The number of screeners requisite for staffing all of the US airports precludes the TSA from exclusively employing screeners with the ability to make “judgment calls”. There just aren’t enough smart people with the desire to work a screener’s job in the US.

Lowrey adds:

Well, for one, the United States would need a whole lot more security guards — at least according to my back-of-the-envelope math. Say each passenger flying through a U.S. airport received on average 10 minutes of questioning from one guard. That would work out to 7.35 billion minutes, or 123 million hours, of work annually. We’d need 3 million full-time guards to perform it. That’s 200,000 more people than the total number of active and reserve military personnel, and twice the number of U.S. Wal-Mart employees. It would cost somewhere north of $150 billion a year. Sheesh.

Working the math out another way, let’s say that the U.S. decided to spend as much per passenger as Israel does, according to the Bloomberg analysis. We’d then pour around $62.2 billion a year into airport security — more than 10 times what we currently spend on airport security, and about as much as we spent fighting the war in Afghanistan last year.

Aside from the culture, manning, and cost issues — which strike me as insurmountable — the other problems with copying the Israeli model are time and space.   Israel is, after all, roughly the size of a rich American’s backyard.  So, not a lot of domestic flights.  And not all that many flights to its nearby neighbors, either, since Israel is surrounded by hellholes full of people who hate Israelis.  Americans, by contrast, fly constantly because of the vast distances between business associates and relatives.  It’s nothing to get on a plane for a business meeting or holiday meal and fly back that evening.

The upshot of all this is that American airports are typically crowded.  Now, imagine if we had to spend 15-20 minutes talking to each passenger to determine whether they’re terrorists.   Add another two or three hours at the airport waiting to get through security. Where do you put everybody?

And, remember, we’re talking about a virtually non-existent threat.   We had the 9/11 attacks, which were truly shocking because of their surprise value and the devastation they caused on the ground.  In the ensuing eight-plus years, we’ve had two other serious attempts, both of which failed through a combination of stupid terrorists and proactive passengers.

We don’t know precisely how many would-be terrorists have been apprehended before they could board a plane.  Since we haven’t heard about them, however, I strongly suspect that the number is less than one.   After all, the feds love to hold news conferences to tout foiled terrorist plots, even ones that were at best aspirational.

Josh Marshall voices a question that I’ve had in my head for awhile, too:

I tend to agree that if a young person gets on an international flight, not only with no checked luggage but no carry ons that suggest he plans on ever getting off the plane, that is sort of a tip off. But in these cases, I always wonder: Isn’t it or why isn’t it part of terrorist best practices to just bring some phony luggage? With all the trouble and subterfuge terrorists have to go to get stuff on planes, this seems fairly straightforward. This isn’t a criticism of the policies. And obviously Abdulmutallab didn’t do this. But in cases like this, I always do wonder: why?

Anyone who even remotely keeps up with the news knows that one-way tickets and a lack of luggage are going to raise eyebrows.  So, why wouldn’t terrorists — let alone those sent by the well-financed al Qaeda to pull of major jobs — avoid these traps?  Surely, Osama can afford to spring for a suitcase — into which the suicide bomber can put his actual crap, since he won’t be needing it, anyway — and a return ticket?

Robert Mackey has a theory: “These guys…are idiots.”

His example is the al Qaeda moron who infiltrated the CIA and then blew up seven low-level agents rather than actually gaining complex intelligence or at least waiting for a higher-profile target.  But the examples are legion.  Recall that the 1993 World Trade Center terrorists were caught so easily because they went to get the deposit back on their rental van.  Or the ineptitude of the shoe bomber and underwear bomber.

To be sure, this is not a new idea.  Daniel Pipes has been pushing the “stupid terrorists” meme for years.

Like most other criminals, terrorists just aren’t very smart.  Given how lousy we are at catching them, that’s a good thing.

Longtime national security blogger Michael Yon posted this on his Facebook page about an hour ago:

Got arrested at the Seattle airport for refusing to say how much money I make. (The uniformed ones say I was not “arrested”, but they definitely handcuffed me.) Their videos and audios should show that I was polite, but simply refused questions that had nothing to do with national security. Port authority police eventually came — they were professionals — and rescued me from the border bullies.

Michelle Malkin files this under “Homeland Security is a Joke,” along with news that 76-year-old comedienne Joan Rivers was “deemed a danger to national security and booted from a Newark-bound flight in Costa Rica on Sunday by a jittery Continental Airlines gate agent who found the two names on her passport fishy.”   Because, you know, 76-year-old Jewish ladies in expensive clothes are as likely as anyone to blow up the plane.

In an update, Yon posts,

When they handcuffed me, I said that no country has ever treated me so badly. Not China. Not Vietnam. Not Afghanistan. Definitely not Singapore or India or Nepal or Germany, not Brunei, not Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Kuwait or Qatar or United Arab Emirates. No county has treated me with the disrespect can that can be expected from our border bullies.

We’ve got only Yon’s side of the story thus far and it honestly doesn’t make much sense.   While I’ve never flown in and out of Seattle, I’ve flown in and out of the country several times post-9/11 and have never been asked, coming or going, how much I made or anything more personal than “What’s the purpose for your visit?”   If, however, they are asking these sort of insipid questions — let alone handcuffing people who refuse to answer them — our airline security system has even more problems than I thought.

Yon’s got some interesting stamps on his passport.  But it’s an American passport.  Yon doesn’t exactly have the markings of an al Qaeda operative about him.

The Obama administration has announced that citizens traveling to the United States from 14 countries will undergo more intensive airport security screening.   Eric Lipton for NYT:

Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday. But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through those 14 nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full range of intensified security that was imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, officials said.

The change represents an easing of the immediate response to the attempted bombing of a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit that had been in place the past week. But the restrictions remain tougher than the rules that were in effect before the Dec. 25 incident. And the action on Sunday further establishes a global security system that treats people differently based on what country they are from, evoking protests from civil rights groups.

Citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, countries that are considered “state sponsors of terrorism,” as well as those of “countries of interest” — including Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen — will face the special scrutiny, officials said. Passengers holding passports from those nations, or taking flights that originated or passed through any of them, will be required to undergo full-body pat downs and will face extra scrutiny of their carry-on bags before they can board planes to the United States.

Politico’s Mike Allen is more explicit:

All travelers flying into the U.S. from foreign countries will receive tightened random screening, and 100 percent of passengers from 14 terrorism-prone countries will be patted down and have their carry-ons searched, the Obama administration was notifying airlines on Sunday.

Matthew Weaver, reporting for Guardian, adds:

From today US airports have also been instructed to increase “threat-based” screening of passengers who may be acting in a suspicious manner. The screening will include full body pat-downs, bag searches, full body scanning and scans by explosive detectors.

Naturally, this is generating angry reaction from civil rights groups:

The changes will mean that any citizen of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia will for the first time be patted down automatically before boarding any flight to the United States. Even if that person has lived in a country like Britain for decades, he now will be subject to these extra security checks.

Nawar Shora, the legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the rule wrongly implies that all citizens of certain nations are suspect.

“I understand there needs to be additional security in light of what was attempted on Christmas Day,” Mr. Shora said, adding that he intended to file a formal protest on Monday. “But this is extreme and very dangerous. All of a sudden people are labeled as being related to terrorism just because of the nation they are from.”

But New York Senator Chuck Schumer thinks this and more is necessary.

“You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to realize that flights that originate in foreign countries pose a greater danger,” he said.

But is that really the case? We’ve had seven attempts to blow up domestic airliners: The four planes on 9/11, the shoe bomber, and the underwear bomber. The first four were domestic flights. The second departed from Paris, France — a country not on the enhanced screening list — and the attempted terrorist held a British passport. Only the underwear bomber came from one of the countries on the list; but the list was a reaction to his attempt, so that’s not a big surprise.

Moreover, as Lipton notes,

In the United States, an order for a “second screening” has already been in effect for a dozen countries. But the requirement often does not have much of an impact because most passengers traveling domestically in the United States use driver’s licenses — not passports — when passing through checkpoints, so officials do not know their nationality and there is less of a chance that they would receive extra attention.

These measures would have done nothing to avert 9/11 or Richard Reid. It’s doubtful that they’d have found the bomb hidden in Abdulmutallab’s underdrawers with a pat down but it’s not inconceivable that they would. But, of course, knowing which 14 countries are being screened, al Qaeda will simply fly future would-be plane bombers out of a different country. Or do their acts on a domestic airliner. Or, perhaps, they’ll simply find other crowded targets that don’t employ security screening.

So this is, once again, a bit of security theater designed to create the illusion we’re doing something meaningful.