Reports are
coming in that the explosives in London all appear to have had timers.
The Madrid bombs were triggered remotely by cell phones.
Which invites the question: Is al Qaeda having trouble recruiting suicide bombers?
Let's hope so.
UPDATE #1: More:
The image of al-Qaeda as a powerful global conspiracy with a central command is largely a product of fevered Western imaginations. What we are facing are really small groups of disaffected Islamic youth, many of them middle class and just as likely to come from home as from abroad, who are finding it increasingly hard (though never impossible) to operate. Of course, we should not put too much emphasis on the numbers game of falling death tolls. It is always possible that something like the London cell could get lucky and pull off a spectacular attack tomorrow. But it is the political weakness of the terrorists that these attacks revealed most starkly.
Read
the whole thing.
Meanwhile, a Samizdata blogger makes
a good observation:
So London was attacked and hundreds were killed or wounded by Islamic fanatics (showing incidently why we are utterly right to be fighting these vermin wherever they are to be found)... and having ID cards would have made not one damn bit of difference.
Finally, there is some early speculation about whether any of the London terrorists might have been released from Guantanamo Bay. There is of course no way to know — for now. Regardless, it certainly puts the politically correct nonsense about Koran desecration (Korans that
we gave them, incidentally) into perspective.
UPDATE #2: Or
maybe not. It now appears that at least one and possibly all four explosions were the work of suicide bombers. Even more disconcerting is that all four suspected bombers appear to have been native-born Britons, although of Pakistani descent, and at least one suspected bomber was only 19 years old. Sad and disturbing.
UPDATE #3: Or
maybe so after all --
Suicide bombers do not buy return tickets. Theirs is a one-way trip. When four young men met at Luton railway station a week ago last Thursday, however, they gave every impression of going to London and coming back. They paid and displayed, leaving valid tickets on the windows of a Nissan Micra and a Fiat Bravo in the station car park. They boarded the 7.48am to London carrying return tickets.
Not conclusive, but then again neither is the fact that they died in the bombings. (Hat tip to
Tim Blair.)
