05.16.12
Fruit of the loom: Platoons of suspected underwear bombers
Law enforcement and homeland security personnel face an average of 55 daily encounters with “known or suspected terrorists” named on government watchlists, officials told Reuters.
The figure – which equals more than 20,000 contacts per year – underscores the growing sweep of the watchlists, which have expanded significantly since a failed Christmas Day 2009 bombing attempt of a U.S. airliner. But officials note that very few of those daily contacts lead to arrests …
All because of the failed underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
al Qaeda can only wish it had 20,000 under-trouser men.
Trivia note; This Reuters piece was penned by Mark Hosenball.
Hosenball, along with Michael Isikoff, were the journalists who were assigned to cover the London ricin trial when I broke the news of it in this country through GlobalSecurity.Org.
I wrote last week, in a piece on the travesty of al Qaeda and underwear bombers:
[Everything in the story] was wrong except the things I told him and a colleague.
You have to go a bit of a way to find national security journalists who are worse than these kinds of guys.