Atta and his band of "wanna learn to fly, but not how to land" guys would have looked silly too... But we know better now. If a terror plot - or when a terror plot succeeds - the New York Times will be the first to condemn our guys for not catching it... What a world.
I forget where I read it, I think in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, but it was about an Indian who decided to do something about the “Iron Horse”. On his first try, he lassoed it and tried to pull it off the tracks. That didn’t work. On his second try, he tore loose a rail.
Richard Reid trying to light his shoe-borne-explosives (SBE) on fire sounded pretty funny at first too. When I realized what would have happened if he hadn’t failed though, it made me sick with dread at how close to death the hundreds on that plane were.
Mr. Lowry hits a home run with this one.
They only have to “get lucky” once.
“.....pleading that the amateurishness of the plot limited its newsworthiness.”
It is a mistake to regard this as “amateurish”. Forget the “pipeline” part of it. Rupturing and igniting just one of these tanks would have begun a chain reaction (albeit a slow one) until most of the tanks on the farm were ruptured from the heat. There are simply too many tanks too close together in this age of terror. Rupture, ignite and spill just one of them and it would be like a roomful of pingpong balls on mousetraps. You do not and cannot extinguish 500k or a million gallons of anything spread on the ground before the next one bursts and ignites, etc etc.
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A terror plot can be something as simple as flying here, renting a car, and then plowing througho a crowd of people on a pedestrian mall in a city.
That's what the liberal idiots choose not to grasp. The terroristic intent, once revealed, needs to be shut down with extreme prejudice.