Incompetent Terrorism

They failed over Detroit and failed in Denmark: apparently, certain terrorist apprentices are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, as the saying goes.

Certainly, in all jobs and professions, there exists a percentage of incompetent persons. Yet since Richard Reid (the one who, in 2001, was incapable of making his shoe explode on a Paris-Miami flight), we must face the evidence: incompetence is king in the domain of terror.

Consequently, the Somali citizen who, on New Year’s Day, attempted to assassinate one of the artists of the famous Mohamed caricatures failed lamentably. To have armed himself with a simple axe to complete this undertaking was not particularly brilliant. The same goes for the young Nigerian who tried to hijack flight 253 between Amsterdam and Detroit on Christmas. Setting fire to his private parts was not the best way to prepare to meet 72 virgins!

In 2006, men who were training to attack a military base in New Jersey (with arms, explosives, and so on) recorded video images of their training, embellished with virulent sermons glorifying jihad. They then brought the cassette to a photocopy shop to have it copied. Four among them are in prison for life – the fifth for 33 years.

Besides, it is not only Allah’s crazies who demonstrate a certain weakness of spirit.

In Idaho last May, eco-terrorists determined to save the planet broke eggs on the large cars on display at an automobile dealer. They also left a note (in the vein of: “down with fossil fuels!”) written on the back of the bill linked to the purchase of the eggs. Through the store’s surveillance camera, they were quickly tracked down.

Wicked Omelet

Surely, all of this is laughable—provided that one does not find oneself, for example, on one of the aforementioned planes. But within the American Secret Service, nobody finds these incidents funny. That is for two reasons.

The first lies in the fact that the ‘pants bomber’ in particular brought attention to the very serious errors of counter-terrorism. To have not paid enough attention to what was going on in Yemen is one of them: the situation there has deteriorated so far that Washington and London judged it prudent to close their embassies in Sanaa yesterday. Another persistent error: the inability of the Secret Service to coordinate its activities and transmit information.

The Americans affirm that a dozen al-Qaeda “cadres” directly under Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have been liquidated over the past 2 years. But to identify the free electrons of terrorism—these amateurs who pop up all over the place, practically without any organizational ties—is more difficult.

That they are amateurs is in this circumstance is somewhat of a blessing.