A terrorist trial with a silver lining
By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, February 11, 2010 - 0 Comments
The underwear bomber’s trial could help Detroit
When accused underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried unsuccessfully to blow up a jet destined for Detroit on Christmas Day, it made the city the focal point for one of the year’s scariest stories. Many in Motown must have wondered, why us? Detroit has been handed more than its fair share of chilling news in recent years—though mostly of the economic variety. The bankruptcy filings of two of the former “Big Three” Detroit automakers last year capped off decades of industrial decline. Unemployment is soaring, and downtown office towers now sit ominously vacant. But is there a silver lining here for the hard-luck city?
If Abdulmutallab’s trial is held in Detroit, as many anticipate, it could ultimately give the local economy a badly needed shot in the arm. That’s because it promises to be a long affair that draws a mob of U.S. and foreign media—not to mention deep-pocketed lawyers—to the U.S. District Court in downtown Detroit, where they will stay in local hotels, eat in local restaurants, and perhaps shop in local stores. Tourist experts say short conferences of even a few hundred people can inject hundreds of thousands of dollars into local economies; the Detroit auto show is estimated to pump $320 million into the region each year, despite running for just two weeks. The debate about whether to move the bigger Sept. 11 attacks trials out of New York City because of concerns about soaring security costs and local disruptions highlights the impact such high-profile events can have on local communities.
In the heyday of the U.S. auto industry, Detroit grew to become the country’s fourth-largest city with a population over 1.8 million. But a flight to the suburbs that picked up speed after the riot of 1967, coupled with the falling fortunes of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, left it with just over 900,000 residents. While the trial of an alleged terrorist is not going to reverse that trend, it could help provide a temporary financial lift for a city that sorely needs a little bit of good news.
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It takes effort to miss the trend here
By Paul Wells - Friday, January 15, 2010 at 10:45 AM - 66 Comments
Like bin Laden, Abdulmutallab wanted to create chaos.
“Consider this hypothetical,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in The Atlantic three years ago. “It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm . . . If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.”Yeah, not so much. In December 2009, a young Nigerian Muslim saw the new face of America, Barack Hussein Obama, on his television and kept sewing high explosive into his underwear. On Christmas Day, the man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, wore his stuffed shorts onto Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam, tried to detonate them over Detroit, and the rest is hysteria.
So it turns out that the mere sight of a black President with Muslims among his ancestors won’t stop a terrorist cold in his tracks. There was something almost sweet about the idea: maybe murderous hatred of the United States could be tipped back into something more benign, simply by showing George W. Bush and Dick Cheney the door. It would be excellent if it were true, but it isn’t. And that wasn’t the only myth that blew up when Abdulmutallab’s pants did.
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Canada's no-fly list—who's considered too dangerous?
By Martain Patriquin and Michael Friscolanti - Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 3:16 PM - 26 Comments
A Montreal Muslim stuck on the no-fly list is fighting to get off
The Canadian “no-fly” list is such a sensitive document that the federal government won’t even disclose how many names it contains. Instead, Transport Canada has simply assured the public that the top-secret list, in effect since 2007, is based on “reliable and vetted” intelligence collected from trusted sources. Translation: if you’re on it, authorities have good reason to believe you are an aspiring hijacker. Or worse—another Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up a U.S. jet on Christmas Day.Though classified, the Canadian list contains one name for sure: Hani Ahmed Al Telbani. As first reported in Maclean’s, the 28-year-old Muslim—an engineering grad who allegedly surfed extremist websites using the online alias “Mujahid Taqni” (Technical Jihad)—is the only person to ever be denied boarding as a result of the so-called Passenger Protect Program, which springs into action when a blacklisted individual arrives at the check-in counter. A Palestinian immigrant, Telbani tried to catch a flight from Montreal’s Trudeau Airport to Saudi Arabia on June 4, 2008, but instead of a seat number, the airline agent handed him an “Emergency Direction” from Transport Canada. “You,” it proclaimed, “pose an immediate threat to aviation security.”
But 18 months later, with airport safety once again at the top of the agenda, the evidence against Hani Al Telbani has been called into question—and with it, the credibility of the entire no-fly list. As the American government scrambles to figure out how its own maze of anti-terror watch lists failed to thwart a potential catastrophe, Canadian officials have been forced to consider a very different question: does our no-fly list include some names that don’t belong there?
According to an internal government report obtained by Maclean’s, a team of independent investigators has concluded that Telbani is not too dangerous to fly. Commissioned by Ottawa, the report is especially critical of the country’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. It was CSIS that convinced Transport Canada to ground Telbani, relying on evidence that was “decidedly vague and incomplete.” -
How to respond to the "Stupid Terrorists Club"
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 10:55 AM - 13 Comments
What didn’t kill us could make us stupider
It took only a few hours after reports emerged of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt at blowing up a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day for Internet wags to start making light of the incident, calling Abdulmutallab the “crotchbomber,” the “jockstrap jihadi,” and a member of the terrorist “brotherhood of the travelling pants.”
Soon after, U.S. officials hit upon what must count as one of the greatest innovations in public security in years: mockery. Would-be suicide bombers now know that if they try, but screw up, their scorched underwear will be paraded before cameras for all to laugh at. Add that to the indignity of having your sad I’m-so-lonesome-I-could-die online ramblings read aloud on air by attractive young news anchors, and it makes you wonder why anyone would sign up for this terror business in the first place.
Why, you’d have to be stupid. For aspiring terrorists though, it would appear that being remarkably stupid is something close to a job requirement. The classic case is the Fort Dix six—a group of Islamic radicals who plotted to attack the U.S. army base in New Jersey in 2007. But first they made a DVD of themselves firing weapons and yelling “Allah Akbar,” and it all went sideways when they took the DVD in to Circuit City to be copied; they were promptly ratted out to the authorities by staff.
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We keep you alive—for now
By Colby Cosh - Sunday, December 27, 2009 at 2:16 PM - 50 Comments
The terror attack on Northwest 253: another blow to the “Poverty is the root cause of terrorism” crowd—not that it will shut them up; nothing ever does—and another sad triumph for the Gambetta-Hertog “Engineers of Jihad” hypothesis.
