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Jeff A. Taylor gets out his terrorist mind-reading kit to figure out why their foiled plots are becoming more and more supervillain-esque.
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|7.10.06 @ 12:30PM|#
"FBI informant's expensive account"
Should that be "expense account" instead?
VM|7.10.06 @ 12:36PM|#
Actually the flooding was step one of the grand plan. Flooding was essential for delivering the sharks with laser beams attached to them to NYC so they could cause mayhem!
|7.10.06 @ 12:51PM|#
Jeff,
I think the Islamist obsession with the World Trade Center was more than a little bit of cargo cult economics. Had the WTC been named the Robert Mosses Towers, I really believe they would have never been targets. I think these clowns looked at the name "World Trade Center" and really thought that they could damage world trade and thus the American Satan by blowing them up. The fact that the buildings were giant white elephants built by an out of control, unaccountable, public sector that never paid for themselves much less make a profit was beyond the Islamist comprehension. They just saw "World Trade Center" and thought, "if we destroy that, the evil Western economies will grind to a halt." Think about it, if you want to kill a lot of people, fly a plane into the stands at a college football game. If you want to destroy something symbolic, destroy the Statue of Liberty or Independence Hall or something like that. Until the tragedy on 9-11, no one outside of New York cared much about the towers and they were not even the world's tallest buildings anymore. Why the twin towers? Cargo Cult economics I say.
|7.10.06 @ 1:46PM|#
John -- I think the WTC had long been a more prominant emblem of New York and the United States outside of the US than it was to Americans. Moreover, the WTC seems to have had particular symbolic resonance to the Islamic Millennialist mindset as evoking "Iram of the Columns" -- A symbolic city of Godless wealth and decadence ala' Babylon or Sodom and Gomorrah. See: http://www.mille.org/scholarship/papers/ADAM.html
-------------------------
I also think that this intent to "flood Manhattan" has gotten garbled somewhere. Since the streets of Manhattan are substantially above sea level, flooding a tunnel is obviously not going to turn it into Venice. However it might be possible to flood New York's underground infrastructure (subways and service tunnels) to cause substantial economic damage. The blog at johnreilly.info noted that something similar happend accidentally in Chicago in 1992 -- http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/disasters/tunnel_flood.html -- though the impact seems to have been less than catastrophic.
R C Dean|7.10.06 @ 2:05PM|#
I think they picked the WTC because it was so freakin' easy to see from the air and hit with an airplane.
Ditto for the Pentagon. The White House, by contrast, is very difficult to find from the air, and even the Capitol isn't as easy as the Pentagon.
|7.10.06 @ 2:12PM|#
why their foiled plots are becoming more and more supervillain-esque.
It obviously the fault of liberal Hollywood and their superhero movies.
|7.10.06 @ 2:49PM|#
See, I just figured that the ones we were catching were the idiots inspired by movies and more of a threat to themselves than others.
I figured anyone actually with the resources and intelligence to pull something off wouldn't be plotting so openly.
I suspect the problem is Bush is so desperate to prove he's winning the War on Terror that we're bragging even more about how we catch the morons. I'm just grateful he hasn't started bragging about the smarter ones we're listening to.
|7.10.06 @ 3:57PM|#
I think the Islamist obsession with the World Trade Center was more than a little bit of cargo cult economics. Had the WTC been named the Robert Mosses Towers, I really believe they would have never been targets. I think these clowns looked at the name "World Trade Center" and really thought that they could damage world trade and thus the American Satan by blowing them up
Interesting.
I think we should try the "flypaper" thing by building a cheap plywood tower in the middle of nowhere, but call it the "Zionist-Crusader Global Conspiracy Headquarters."
R C Dean|7.10.06 @ 4:29PM|#
Stevo - that would be Tel Aviv.
|7.10.06 @ 4:41PM|#
VM: That would be: Sharks with "laser" beams.
|7.10.06 @ 4:41PM|#
VM: That would be: Sharks with "laser" beams.
|7.10.06 @ 5:34PM|#
Do you think the terrorists are a victim of their own initial success? Having knocked down the Towers in a failure spectacular and bloody attack, perhaps they think nothing else will catch their attention. You never hear about the LA airport shootings, for example. Perhaps the terrorists think a car bomb exploding outside a mall will just be forgotten too quickly in America.
|7.10.06 @ 7:25PM|#
"One ... BILLION ... dollars."
|7.10.06 @ 10:10PM|#
From the article:
In fact, bin Laden himself has repeatedly urged his followers to find ways to "bleed" the U.S. financially.
Yet they haven't thought to run for Congress? Amateurs.