aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, July 16, 2005

London lessons

On the Sunday chat shows last weekend, I heard a lot of things from the pundits I just don’t buy about the London bombing.

Most significantly, we seem to believe that we have hobbled Al Qaeda’s ability to pull off large scale attacks.

Hello? Doesn’t anyone remember how long it was between World Trade Center attacks?

We’ve also concluded that London’s openness is at fault and our Patriot Act keeps us from suffering the same fate.

I don’t think so.

Yesterday on This American Life, we heard the story of The Arms Trader:

The U.S. government spent two years on a sting operation, trapping an Indian man named Hemant Lakhani whom they suspected of being an illegal arms dealer. It’s one of the few cases that has gone to trial in the War on Terror, and one the Justice Department has pointed to as one of their big successes. In the end, they got Lakhani, red-handed, delivering a missile to a terrorist in New Jersey. The only problem was, nothing in the sting was what it appeared to be. Including the missile.

In the end we learn that they got Lakhani. But what Lakhani did was buy a fake missile from a fake arms dealer for a fake terrorist.

My problem is this: The guy may have been a bad guy who did a bad thing. But this fake deal soaked up a lot of time, money and manpower. All of which might have been better spent on the real terrorist threat.