Thursday, 6 May 2010

Headline of the day

From CBS News:
Faisal Shahzad's Motive Shrouded in Mystery
In further developments, CBS News closed down today when their highly trained journalists were trapped in their offices because they were stumped by the large, obvious doorknobs.

1 comment:

Sergej said...

To be fair, the "trying to determine motive" in the article seems to be coming from the FBI, not the CBS reporter. There was something about red flags the man threw up by leaving the country to pursue extended education in Waziristan being noticed, and his being on a watch list. This is reassuring; it indicates that whatever the clowns in Washington are trying to do, and whatever the news types' and faculty lounge crowd's fashionable opinions might be, at least on the small scale, the FBI was doing its job.

Assuming that the "motive unknown" was coming from a (competent) FBI source, I might interpret the question as, when did this guy decide to go all jihadi on us? A reasonable theory might be that he grew bored with his quite decent life in America and decided to go for the houris, but dropping everything and going to Pakistan to train right after being granted citizenship is very strange timing. If this was not a coincidence---was he planning to do something since before coming here? In that case, who gave him the idea, back home? In design, the bomb was intended to be quite vicious, and its placement outside the theater playing Lion King indicates that Our Hero wanted to murder children specifically, but I could probably build something more dangerous out of office supplies. Ten years of drooling in anticipation of heavenly rewards, and in the end he is caught, and gets several decades of prison hospitality from his new best friend and rommate, Bubba, because of mechanical ineptness. That's not an unhappy ending, in my opinion.

So anyway, I'd give this article the benefit of the doubt. There is information there, and also several interesting questions. That the headline was... amusing, well, those things happen to journalists.