It didn’t work in either case.

Bin Laden at large: Security Risk, Raise Alert Level, TSA touches my Junk
Bin Laden dead: Security Risk, Raise Alert Level, TSA touches my Junk

Sweet, sweet victory.

To echo everyone above, if they had managed to acquire a big bomb of any sort, we would have known by the explosion in New York (or maybe LA).

The criminal organization known as TEPCO beat Al Qaeda to it.

So, just double checking here:

Bin Laden at large: Security Risk, Raise Alert Level, TSA touches my Junk
Bin Laden dead: Security Risk, Raise Alert Level, TSA touches my Junk

In case you hadn’t noticed, the color-coded ‘all panic all the time’ Homeland Security Advisory System has been replaced by the National Terrorism Advisory System, which “will include information specific to the particular credible threat, and will not use a color-coded scale.” (FAQ #1, Dept. of Homeland Security home page is headlined “Beware of Osama Bin Laden Email Phishing Schemes“, which warns Americans that “major news events like this one often bring a wave of phishing scams”.

The DHS home page also links to a Statement by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano on the Death of Osama Bin Laden, which specifically says:

We remain at a heightened state of vigilance, but the Department of Homeland Security does not intend to issue an NTAS alert at this time. I have been clear since announcing NTAS in January that we will only issue alerts when we have specific or credible information to convey to the American public.

You might want to ‘double check’ the possibility that you could be operating on an outmoded paradigm.

Personally, I say fuck the the TSA and homeland security. Telling people to beat the shit out of anyone trying to set off a bomb has been the most effective security measure we have implemented to date, and it is very cheap. Cheap is a good thing when you defend against a threat that ranks below choking on your own food and MANY orders of magnitude below eating yourself to death.

Somehow, I don’t think scary bombers who when attempting to blow up a plane manage to literally blow their dick up without hurting anyone else are really in much of a position to nuke us. I just hope that we get it out of our heads that these incompetent morons are a threat and that we go find something more interesting to waste our money on… like paying down the debt, or buying everyone in the US some waffles.

To all the ‘scary’ would be terrorist making empty threats I have only two words:

u mad?

You know how he loves surprises.

Rattle on you crazy diamonds.

However, it is much more likely that they are thinking of a conventional bomb being used at a US or UK nuclear power station. (Fukushima has amply demonstrated the mayhem that can be caused by that degree of damage, albeit by an act of nature in that instance.)

Security people in the UK detained a group of men filming facilities at the Sellafield nuclear processing plant yesterday and though it would be nice to think they were just film school grads out for the day the indications are to the contrary.

Pretending that serious acts of reprisal are not now on the agenda would be a little naive. Just sayin’

Thanks for the pointer jphilby. Great read.

It’s an inevitable show of saber-rattling on both parts. We say, “Boy howdy, lookit all this juicy intel we got off Bin Laden’s hard drives! Every last al-Qaeda secret is laid bare for us to see and exploit!” Swell if it’s true, arguably effective even if it isn’t. Surely a decent percentage of the al Qaeda-associated team can’t know for sure whether the jig’s up or not, so there will result at least a certain amount of panic on their part, to our undisguised glee.

And in the same vein is the threat of… how you say?… oh, yes: “nuclear hellstorm.” Whether or not al Qaeda actually possesses the capability, some American knees will quake. And so our Homeland Security apparatus will overreact as it is wont to do. And the waltz continues…

“One Killer Killing Another”
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/2/one_killer_killing_another_journalist_and

“They see that he is dead, and they say, ‘Oh, great, we killed bin Laden.’ But they don’t see the other 20, 30, 50, 100 people who the U.S. killed that day, many of them children, many of them civilians. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be out in the street cheering about those deaths.”