Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old young man from Nigeria, tried to make his statement by blowing up the plane he was on from Amsterdam to Detroit. According to passengers “there was a pop, and then a puff of smoke”, and then the young man was tackled by passengers and subdued.
CNN and all the news channels are providing all the information (and arguably more) that anyone could ask for. The question I have for all of you is:
“What if anything do you take away from this incident?”
For anyone who has missed the news, this event took place as Northwest Airlines flight 253 from Amsterdam was preparing to land in Detroit. The device seems not to have worked so well and instead of exploding caught on fire, burning the young man badly. His father, a retired banker, had become worried about his son’s radicalization while attending college in England and had reported him to the local US Embassy when he left college to go to Yemen and study “the school of Islam.
My take?
Very glad he failed, it could have been both terrible for those on board and their loved ones as well as for the country as a whole. However, all in all I think it will have little impact on the world and that in itself is the news.
The ability to instill Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) decreases with exposure. This incident in the end will act more as an inoculation to terrorist FUD among the population than it will to infect them with the disorder. You remain much more likely to be in a random airplane incident than an intentional one, and even more likely to be killed by a car while walking your dog.
[Update] The same Delta flight – 253 – is now again at the same remote location at the same Detroit airport after another issue with another Nigerian passenger.
The Associated Press has learned that a second Nigerian man has been taken into custody aboard a jetliner in Detroit after locking himself in the airliner’s bathroom.
The passenger apparently was in the bathroom for an hour, and was then “disruptive”.
The passengers are off the plane at this point
[Update 2] Someone just coined the phrase “Crotch Bomber”, I recommend repeating it endlessly… :~)
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