Kevin lays out the Anatomy of a Terror Attack Bust over at The American Street and highlights the multiple failures of the The Shrubby Inc. to deal with their self-declared Global War On Terror™.

Ashcroft slashed the FBI’s counter-terrorism budget on 09/10/2001. Bush sought to cut $6M in screening technology from the Homeland Security research & development budget, which had already lost $200M in unspent funds from previous years.

Karen has a picture of what traveling by aircraft may look like in the near future, and PZ Myers learns the real reason behind the hospital gowns.

Swopa notes that the Israeli bombing and shelling has done such a great job on the infrastructure of Lebanon that supply trucks can’t get through, so the IDF tried to use llamas.

I don’t make this stuff up; I just report it. The llamas obviously understand that invading Lebanon is not a sane concept.

When you read this CNN headline, Machete-wielding woman outside White House, what is the vision in your mind? The Rwanda massacres? The Moro running amok in the Philippines? A crazed woman running towards the gates of the White House with a machete raised over her head?

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The movies lately have been pretty pathetic, I think it’s time to remake a classic: Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

I’m not sure about the other roles but Joe Lieberman would be a wonderful fit for Senator Joseph Harrison Paine and Karl Rove is an obvious choice for Jim Taylor.

EDB at Anecdotes from a Banana Republic celebrates the end of the first month of the conflict and the Escalatory ceasefire. Apparently not enough people were wounded or killed during the month, so there is a push to up the rate before they have to pretend there’s a peace.

Pierre also notes the Cease-Fire Fantasies of everyone not actually on the killing fields of Lebanon.

I’m still wondering how anyone can claim that Hezbollah is targeting civilians when it kills 2 Israeli military for every Israeli civilian with unguided weapons, while the Israelis are killing at least 3 Lebanese civilians for every 2 Hezbollah military with guided “smart” weapons.

There is something that the Israelis need to understand: after an extended period of terror people run out of adrenalin and can no longer sustain the feeling. They tend to divide into two camps – apathy and anger. The anger is generally directed towards those that terrorized them.

A less generalized and more targeted campaign could have been successful in driving a wedge between Hezbollah and the rest of Lebanon, but the generalized, civilian targeted campaign Israel conducted welded Hezbollah to the rest of Lebanon as the only force striking back.

1. Yogi Berra – American philosopher and sportsman.

John McKay has uncovered the new strategy by the city of Phoenix, Arizona to deal with the homeless: blowing them up!

So there’s this item, let’s say a TracFone® prepaid wireless cellphone, for example. Now poor people living in the inner city can’t afford the regular wired telephone, so they use these prepaid phones.

The phones and the cards you have to buy for airtime minutes are available in the convenience stores that actually exist in the inner city, but the big stores, let’s say Wal-Mart, for example, sell a package that costs $50 in a convenience store for $38.

You’re an intelligent guy/girl and you have access to a car, unlike your neighbors, so you drive to the nearest Wal-Mart, which is nowhere near any inner city, to buy these packages to sell back in the city for $43.

If your name is Park Lee, you are a free market entrepreneur living the American dream.

If your name is Osama Abulhassan or Maruan Muhareb, you are a terrorist.

Amazing how that works.

Update: FBI: No terror threat to Michigan bridge. The three guys from Texas with the 1000 TracFones, bought them to re-sell them and had pictures of the bridge because it’s an amazing sight for people from Texas, according to the FBI.

Ron Suskind has a piece in the nest issue of Time, How to Stay One Step Ahead, in which he writes:

Here’s another lesson from London. Human intelligence routinely trumps fancy and often legally problematic surveillance techniques. The key to discovering the plot was apparently a citizen from Britain’s diverse Islamic community who, in the days after last summer’s bombings in London, overheard something troubling. He contacted authorities. An investigation took root. Imagine: a Muslim man sitting across from a British intelligence official at a cafe, off hours. They have little in common. Some would say they are natural opponents. But a thread of shared interest leads to the passing of information and, a year later, to saving grace.

The U.S. intelligence community is in a poor position to replicate that. Concerned citizens in the Muslim world who are close enough to radicals to see or hear something pertinent seem less inclined than ever to sit down with an American. “They see us right now as an angry, reckless giant supporting the bombing of kids in Lebanon,” says a top U.S. terrorism official. “If they were to see something troubling nowadays, they’d be more inclined than ever to simply look the other way. It’s their inaction-on a vast scale-that’ll kill us.”

It does no good to hoover up phone conversations: there is too much data. A single tip from a person can point to a “thread” that can be traced, and if “pulled gently” can unravel the entire plot.

Shock and Awe™ ^{The Shrubbery Inc.} didn’t work in Iraq or Lebanon, and can’t work in the GWOT™ ^{The Shrubbery Inc.}.

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