http://safdarjungmaaadical.blogspot.com/

this is completely, completely crazy.

Anyway, it’s funny how many times I was picked up for a ‘random’ search when I started flying on a regular basis in the US. It stopped after a while (presumably the system does something!), but now that I started flying internationally, I get screened again. And at Sydney airport (on my way to Melbourne), I’m screened twice everytime I get in. Of course, they’re all just doing their jobs. My sense of dignity can go to hell.

While Police Commissioner Ray Kelly vowed there would be no selective enforcement or racial profiling, some South Asian New Yorkers said that they felt singled out.

Not a lot of detail, but it’s all I could find. Perhaps some of the ethnic press will cover it in detail this week.

On a personal level, I ventured into the city for the first time last night. Granted, it was not rush hour (between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. on a Saturday night , but I took 3 subways, encountered no searches or searching or police presence. This is brilliant, because if someone actually wanted to blow up something, all they would have to do is get on a train at an hour like that and then ride the trains (free transfers, my friends) for some hours, and then detonate. Just one of the many holes that I’m coming to learn are part of this fairly ineffective system. I’m still not sure whether it’s helpful or not, but it’s clearly not sufficient.

I’m so glad Wyoming was getting about seven times more money per capita than New York in 2003 for counterterrorism funding.

An excerpt:

Yet of the $900 million New York City has determined it needs to counter terrorism, it has received only $84 million from the federal government so far. Officials expect to get $75 million more in the next round of funding. The Fire Department, still staggering from its losses on Sept. 11, has sought $331 million in homeland security funding. It has been promised less than $36 million. The NYPD has determined it needs $261 million. It has received only $60 million.

Extracting items from a black backpack at a Brooklyn news conference, Adams said officers’ training has left them unprepared to identify anything other than the simplest type of explosive device or chemical.

According to former FBI agent Mike German, who worked against right-wing terrorist gangs in America and later on an Islamist case, there are many more similarities than differences between the way Muslim suicide bombers and ‘ordinary’ terrorists operate and, hence, between effective ways of defeating them.

I thought that was obvious, and assumed that that Homeland Security was taking advantage of people like this, at least until those Middle-East specialists finally buffed up their language skills, or recruited Iraqi-americans willing to infiltrate a cell. But, just when you couldn’t possibly think less of the Bush administration:

German not only penetrated neo-Nazi groups, he also gathered evidence of sufficient quality to take them to court and send them to prison. Yet after 9/11, he and his colleagues with anti-terrorist experience found themselves derided as mere ‘gumshoes’, unsuitable for use in the new ‘war on terror’. In his view, America made a grave error in rejecting the traditional law-enforcement model in favour of this more abstract concept and its associated methods, such as internment and torture at Bagram and Guantanamo Bay, which has, just about everyone but Bush and Donald Rumsfeld now accept, produced very little hard, ‘actionable’ intelligence.

The article goes on to discuss MI5 and MI6 successfully thwarting the IRA, why investigations into Islamist extremism were dropped in 1994,, and whether the present British anti-terror policies will resemble those in America.

So much the Queen’s Intelligence Service being the best in the world. . .

From the coverage so far, yes. He came out of an apartment complex they were watching.

What type of gun was it

Semiautomatic handgun with low velocity rounds so bystanders aren’t endangered. The Kratos protocol was to shoot in the head multiple times so there’s no reflex action that detonates the bomb. Of course, there are still spinal reflexes and dead man’s triggers, so it wouldn’t work in all cases.

Do you know how quickly you can get off that many bullets?

In about 2-2.5 seconds.