What's most inexplicable about yesterday's scare is that the guy carried explosives and a liquid-filled syringe on to a transatlantic plane - when most of us get stripped of Soltan Factor 8 - despite being on a no-fly list.
Ambinder has the most interesting take on the political ramifications:
I am sure that, in the minds of Obama's top counterterrorism officials, they are trying to figure out whether it is worth putting a name to what might be three loosely connected events. Is it sufficient to say that Zazi, Hasan and this Nigerian are all part of the same circle, the same fundamental structure? Do they represent a phase change in the nature of terrorism? These are harder questions to answer and pose harder questions to solve than the questions of who, what, when, where and how. We'll fix the security flaw, or patch it up as best we can. What the Obama administration lacks now is a theory of terrorism. Maybe one doesn't exist in the real world; maybe the Bush administration's theory of terrorism exacerbated the problem. It is this administration's challenge to explain how their approach keeps us safer, and then to demonstrate that their approach keeps us safer.
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