Terrorist attack in Portland thwarted

Story here.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a Somali-born U.S. citizen, wanted to detonate a truck bomb at Portland's annual Christmas tree lighting the night after Thanksgiving at Pioneer Courthouse Square. An undercover FBI agent provided dummy bomb components, then agents arrested him downtown when he pressed the detonator.

Stupid fucker, hope he gets put in a really deep and dark hole for a nice long time.

And this is why most terrorist plots are foiled: because the people trying to pull them off are complete idiots. No sympathy for him. Give him the right to a fair trial, at which he will be duly sentenced to something pretty damn awful, and good riddance.

Sic semper balatris. Thus ever to fools.

Good on the FBI. From the stories it sounds like this was a successful undercover operation. Nice to see that old-fashioned police work gets the job done.

edited 27th Nov '10 1:07:33 PM by RadicalTaoist

I'm sure my sister will be telling me about this - she lives there.

-Sigh- Well at least the ones we get over here are not the Kludge kings over seas.

The single best thing about terrorists of all stripes, they are not exactly known for their smarts.

And people say profiling doesn't work.. There's a pretty good reason why we have a tendency to monitor muslims named Mohammad who are from regions in the middle east.. All the terrorists out there to catch seem to match that category.

Some of the guys across the pond in the sand box are pretty damn smart and surprisingly capable of causing a lot of damage with limited resources. Never underestimate your enemy that is how you get caught by surprise by some simple but ingenious device or trap.

edited 27th Nov '10 5:14:07 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Well there was that white guy who was in the army who sort of went on a killing spree. Major thingamajig wasn't it?

Anyway, whilst profiling may work in some cases (likelyhood of radicalisation is most popular among poor/young) it falls apart when you start treating an entire subsection of the populace as if they are ALL seconds away from killing everyone around them.

For one thing, it tends to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it? I know the thing that makes me the most civic-minded is being considered a dangerous subversive no matter what I do.

No, wait, the opposite of that.

It makes you want to use a truck bomb to kill a bunch of people?

If you only search middle-easterners you'll only find plots being run by middle-easterners.

But of course, white terrorists get their own TV shows on Animal Planet.

But how many times have they planned to bomb anything since after Mc Veigh?

Well there was 2010 here in Northern Ireland? Or that thing where far right groups sent anthrax to a democrat headquarters in the last election. Or 2009 in Britain when the "real IRA" started attacking places again. Y'know, a few places.

I was more thinking along the lines of in the US, the IRA is a bit of a special issue.

I stopped watching Whale Wars, last I checked they were still just using smoke bombs. They do attempt to sink the ships though.

edited 27th Nov '10 5:50:26 PM by Yamikuronue

Scott Roeder is white. The dude who flew the plane into the IRS building was white. It was a white guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum.

(Cue excuse for why those don't count as terrorist acts in 3...2...1...)

Domestic terrorists are no less terrorists. In the US you've had various incidents of terrorism and stuff like it, its just that if you DO start profiling only one very large area instead of a smaller one you are going to end up roughing up innocent citizens who simply happen to live in the wrong neighbourhood.

I would line up the guy who flew into the IRS building more as a disgruntled worker shooting type incident than an act of terrorism.

Wasn't Scott Roeder the christian extremist who killed that abortion doctor?

And I hadn't heard about the holocaust museum thing.

Scott Roeder is white. The dude who flew the plane into the IRS building was white. It was a white guy who shot up the Holocaust Museum.

(Cue excuse for why those don't count as terrorist acts in 3...2...1...)

Think you could please be a bit more polite?

We haven't had any large scale terrorist plots or attacks by White American's in a while. The Hutaree would almost count if it wasn't basically put down as entrapment.

If your reaction to profiling to find dangerous people is to commit mass murder you are the kind of person they are looking for.

The problem is that Barkey said the best kind of people to profile were "muslims named Mohammad who are from regions in the middle east." Thats not neccesarily people who are going to commit mass murder.

Racial profiling doesn't work and in fact makes things worse, but I don't think that's the topic.

Apparently he was gonna bomb the Christmas tree lighting? Weird.

That's not necessarily people who are going to commit mass murder.

While this is true and I never agreed with the profiling stance I am also pointing a rather large Flaw with Karalora's. logic. If your answer to something is violence against the civilian populace rather then a government you are in the wrong. Sometimes the government has it coming.

I am well aware of the flaws of profiling in general and believe it generates too many false positives to be useful. Much like torture for information does.

edited 27th Nov '10 7:05:46 PM by TuefelHundenIV

A moot point since in this case, profiling and Patriot Act wiretap bullshit isn't what caught the guy; from the indication of the story, it was a combination of screening the associates of known terrorists and trawling the websites where these jackasses congregate. The "this is why we need to keep denying privacy to those Muslims" spiel isn't supported by this instance.