Americans owe a debt of thanks to Najibullah Zazi, since he has made it far more difficult for Islamic terrorists operating in the U.S. to buy the supplies they would need to make conventional bombs. Acquiring nail-polish remover and hydrogen peroxide in industrial quantities at a suburban Colorado beauty supply store, Zazi told the check-out clerk that he had many girlfriends. His thick, black beard alone should have been enough to arouse suspicions. “Oh, that? I am playing the role of Mr. Abraham Lincoln on the stage of your community college.” Looking more like a fugitive from Guantanamo than Honest Abe, Zazi is destined to become the poster boy for a War on Terror that President Obama has been too gutless to prosecute. Now that his picture has appeared in all the newspapers, every American who works behind a counter will be on the lookout for swarthy, bearded guys with heavy accents who would buy their beauty supplies by the carload. Or rent U-Haul trucks. Or pay cash for motel rooms. If terrorists want to continue to buy their supplies locally, they’re going to have to recruit accomplices who look more like Robert Redford, not some, bearded, wild-eyed sociopath right out of a South Park cartoon.
Zazi and his lawyer have also helped to fix in our minds the flimsy lies and evasions to which the terrorist will resort when caught red-handed. When he was undergoing daily grillings by the FBI, Zazi told the Denver Post that investigators would never have let him go at the end of each day if they had thought he was guilty. “I am just an airport driver,” he said, sounding like Hyman Roth in The Godfather when he told reporters he was just a retired investor with a pension. Zazi attorney Art Folsom, simply doing his job, argued that his client should be placed on an electronic monitor rather than jailed. “His wife lives in Pakistan, but the entire rest of his family lives in Colorado,” Folsom told the judge in arguing for bail (which, reasonably, was denied). “His mother and his father and his five brothers and sisters…he actually lives in the very same physical residence with his family. If that is not a strong family tie to Colorado, I do not know what is?” Just the kind of folks you want as neighbors.
Clear Tracks
If this incident poses a danger to Americans, it is that some will be lulled into thinking all Islamist terror cells operating in the U.S. will leave tracks as easy to follow as Zazi’s. There was his too-brief trip from Colorado to Pakistan shortly before the anniversary of 9/11. And his use of a rental car to drive from Colorado to New York City for the flight. And there were those meticulous instructions on his laptop for making a powerful bomb from commonly available ingredients. There was also a flurry of urgent e-mails between him and his al-Qaeda handlers as he labored to perfect a weapon of destruction shortly before it was to have been deployed on 9/11/09.
Good thing the FBI was watching – and that their efforts to break this case were not hampered by the usual phalanx of ACLU lawyers, eager as always to comfort and aid the enemy. The War on Terror has been revived, and not a moment too soon.
(If you’d like to have Rick’s Picks commentary delivered free each day to your e-mail box, click here.)
Well sometimes stereotypy works. Old fashioned way but do work. Because what kind of people would do things such as this?
ps: Ok I could be wrong. It’s not written that white guys black guys or oriental guys won’t do things such as this…. lol