The Airline Bomb Plot

Cast your memory back to the summer of 2006. One of the prospective suicide bombers wanted to bring his baby son along to die with him. His wife resisted. Daniel Henninger on the airline bomb plot trial, currently proceeding in London:

The prosecution said a computer memory stick on one of the men at his arrest listed the targeted flights. They were:

United Airlines Flight 931 to San Francisco; UA959 to Chicago; UA925 to Washington; Air Canada 849 to Toronto; AC865 to Montreal; American Airlines 131 to New York and AA91 to Chicago. The first flight would depart at 2:15 p.m., the last at 4:50 p.m., allowing all to be aloft and out of U.S. or British airspace when they fell.

The private intelligence-analysis agency, Stratfor, concludes from the trial that "al Qaeda remains fixated on aircraft as targets and, in spite of changes in security procedures since 9/11, aircraft remain vulnerable to attack."

Martyrdom video via Powerline. More from Henninger:

The men planned to take the bomb pieces onboard for assembly: empty plastic bottles, a sugary drink powder, hydrogen peroxide and other materials to be detonated with the flash on disposable cameras.

The arrests of the men, who say they are innocent, were the result of broad and prolonged surveillance. For months, the suspects were bugged, photographed and wiretapped.

Here in the U.S., our politics has spent much of the year unable to vote into law the wiretap bill, which is bogged down, incredibly, over giving retrospective legal immunity to telecom companies that helped the government monitor calls originating overseas. Even granting there are Fourth Amendment issues in play here, how is it that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama cannot at least say that class-action lawsuits against these companies are simply wrong right now?

Democrats, cowed by the trial lawyers, complacent about people who would blow up airplanes and kill thousands. Meanwhile, Barack Obama continues his where's Waldo willful blindness on al Qaeda and his flower child navel-gazing politics of the past.