Flit

First they came for the chemistry books

From the New York Times, on the British airline plot:

“There have been 69 searches,” Mr. Clarke, the chief antiterrorist police official from Scotland Yard, said Monday. “These have been in houses, flats and business premises, vehicles and open spaces.”

Investigators also seized more than 400 computers, 200 mobile phones and 8,000 items like memory sticks, CD’s and DVD’s.

400 computers. That sounds like a lot of seizures of private property belonging to people facing no charges, to me at least. Presumably that includes things like all the computers at internet cafes the suspects frequented, etc.

Meanwhile:

A 17-year-old boy accused of storing an explosives manual... connected to an alleged plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners was denied bail at a court appearance on Tuesday... If convicted, he faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Note to self: throw out anything that could be construed as an explosives manual: old chemistry texts, you name it. Those are doubleplusgood unthink now.

The simple fact is this escapade has so far been a total victory for anti-Western terror: massive dislocation of Western society out of all proportion to the effort expended. In achieving its victory, terror has relied on the three things -- superstition, mass hysteria, and scientific ignorance -- of which it seems we have an almost inexhaustible human supply.