The Airline Bomb Plot

[that was so nearly the 'Airline Bomb-ing']

...Here's another hypothetical: Would this conversation be different today if in August 2006 seven airliners had taken off from Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport, bound for the U.S. and Canada and each carrying about 250 passengers, and then blew up over the Atlantic Ocean? [snip]

The view that 9/11 "changed everything" did not hold up under the weight of our politics. Divisions re-emerged between Democrats and Republicans, in office and on the streets. These fights reignited over the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and the warrantless wiretap bill (or "FISA" revision). These arguers stopped to stare momentarily at their televisions when Islamic terrorists succeeded in mass murder in the 2004 Madrid train bombing and the 2005 London subway bombing, but quickly returned to partisan grandstanding... [snip]

The arrests of the men [before they could execute their crime {suicide bombers are not deterable, they must be interdicted}] was the result of broad and prolonged surveillance. For months, the suspects were bugged, photographed and wiretapped. Here in the U.S., our politics has spent much of the year unable to vote into law the wiretap bill, which is bogged down, incredibly, over giving retrospective legal immunity to telecom companies that helped the government monitor calls - originating overseas...[snip]

Philip Bobbitt, author of the just released and thought-provoking book, "Terror and Consent," has written that court warrants are "a useful standard for surveillance designed to prove guilt, not to learn the identity of people who may be planning atrocities."

Planning atrocities is precisely the point.

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