United States 2, Terrorists with shoe bombs, 0

So apparently an Al Qaeda plot to use shoe bombs to hijack a plane and fly it into LA’s Library tower was thwarted in 2002. A few things are interesting about this:

1) Using shoe bombs are apparently the terrorist equivalent of walking under a ladder. 2) Al Qaeda’s outsourcing operations haven’t gone all that well. According to ABC News:

Six months after the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda found itself under siege in Afghanistan. So Khalid Sheik Mohammed decided to contract out the Los Angeles attack. He turned to a terrorist named Hambali, the leader of an al Qaeda affiliate in Southeast Asia. “Rather than use Arab hijackers as he had on September the 11,” Bush said, “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sought out young men from Southeast Asia whom he believed would not arouse as much suspicion.” ABC News has learned Hambali recruited at least four men, including a pilot. Al Qaeda came up with a plan to break open a secure cockpit door using shoe bombs like those worn by al Qaeda operative Richard Reid before he tried to blow up an airliner in 2001. “They are able to figure out what are the obstacles in front of them and figure out ways around those obstacles and they can do it in real time,” said Dick Clarke, former White House counterterrorism czar and now an ABC News consultant. Disaster was averted when one of Hambali’s hijackers was captured in early 2002 by officials in an unnamed country, and he began identifying other members of the plot. Within five months, Hambali was arrested.

Clarke, in the quote, wants to make it appear that Al Qaeda is ultra-nimble and adaptive, and so therefore hard to defeat. This overlooks the fact that any group Al Qaeda outsources to is likely to be more incompetent than Al Qaeda. So this story puts me in a much better mood than Clarke. 3) Time‘s Brian Bennett and Matthew Cooper speculate on the politics of the disclosure: “The timing of the foiled plot’s disclosure, coming as it did as the Administration defends its controversial wiretapping program, struck many observers as more than a little curious.” None of these observers are actually named, but the rest of the paragraph suggests that while the reveal was political in the global sense, I tend to doubt it was consciously timed to deal with Bush’s current difficulties on the anti-terrorism front:

[A]nother senior Administration official told TIME: “The speech was about international cooperation and to show that actions taken have real consequences.” Said the official, “You intrepid journalists can deduce whether there’s a connection between the NSA program and (the West coast plot). Was there a domestic component?” The answer, given that all the alleged cell leaders were captured overseas, would seem to be no.

This brings us to the elements of the Time story that are much more disturbing — the escape of the Al Qaeda terrorists from Yemen:

But at the same time the Administration was chest-thumping about this victory in the war on terror, [counter-terrorism czar Frances Fragos] Townsend had to acknowledge that it is grappling with one of the worst examples of non-cooperation. Over the weekend, 13 convicted Al Qaeda members being held in a Yemeni jail escaped, including the reputed mastermind of the October 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Townsend acknowledged that the jailbreak is “of enormous concern to us, especially given the capabilities and the expertise of the people who were there.” All 13 had been housed together, she said, and “we are disappointed that their restrictions in prison weren’t more stringent.” When asked why the U.S. wasn’t keeping closer tabs on how the Al Qaeda prisoners were being incarcerated in Yemen, a U.S. law enforcement official said, “that assumes the Yemenis care what we think.” Still, the U.S., which has been caught off guard by everything from the flooding of New Orleans to the victory of Hamas, seemed stupified to discover that the Yemenis were allowing the Al Qaeda prisoners to be housed together and to communicate freely. The lax security measures stand in sharp contrast to the isolation of prisoners kept at American controlled facilities in Guantanamo Bay and around the globe.