The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Questions Only Bloomberg Is Asking
A suspect is in custody in Saturday night’s midtown Manhattan car-bombing attempt, MSNBC.com reports:
A Pakistani-born U.S. citizen was hauled off a plane about to fly to the Middle East and arrested in the failed attempt to explode a bomb-laden SUV in Times Square, authorities said Tuesday.
Faisal Shahzad was on board a Dubai-bound flight that was taxiing away from the gate at Kennedy Airport when the plane was stopped and FBI agents and New York Police Department detectives took him into custody late Monday, law enforcement officials said.
Law-enforcement agents appear to have succeeded in extracting intelligence from Shahzad, as this CNN report suggests:
Hours after authorities arrested the Pakistan-American in New York, investigators in Pakistan seized a number of suspects in the probe into the failed car bombing in Times Square, a Pakistani intelligence source said Tuesday.
They arrested two or three people after raiding a house in Karachi where the Times Square bombing suspect, Faisal Shahzad, is believed to have stayed during a recent visit to Pakistan, the source said.
As early as Sunday, the Middle East Media Research institute reported on a possible Pakistan connection. But U.S. officials initially played down this claim, according to an earlier CNN report:
Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud appeared on a video released less than 24 hours after the attempt, claiming Taliban fighters were prepared to inflict “extremely painful blows” in major U.S. cities. But a senior U.S. military official said there was no “credible evidence” at the early stages of the investigation that the Pakistani Taliban was responsible for the Times Square bomb incident.
And one counterintelligence official told CNN there was no evidence of any communications among terrorist organizations overseas about the device after Saturday night’s attempt. “People overseas were not giving high fives . . . or saying anything about the bomb not working,” the official said. “There is no indication that there was that kind of tie.”
The unnamed official was wise not to jump to conclusions. It’s a remarkable contrast with President Obama’s aggressive approach to his domestic political opponents, who he suggested over the weekend may incite “extreme elements” to violence, as we noted yesterday.
New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent elected on the Republican line, actually engaged in some Obamaesque speculation about the attempted bombing, NewsBusters.org reports. Asked by CBS’s Katie Couric if the attack was “a home-grown,” the mayor replied: “Home-grown, maybe a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.”
Hey, you never know! It could be that Shahzad and his suspected co-conspirators were enraged over ObamaCare. And if President Obama has lost the Pakistani Taliban, he’s lost Middle America.
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