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[Aqizzar]

As I'm sure everyone in the world has heard and since filed away as a resolved matter, on December 25 a man from Nigeria connected to the Yemeni branch of al-Qaida tried to blow his ballbag off on an airplane.  Calvin Trillin had perhaps the happiest and saddest day of his life.  Yes, it was two weeks ago and has faded into the joking corner of the public consciousness, but I'd like to talk about it.

To summarize: Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, son of a Nigerian banker (a real one) who was 14 years old in 2001, apparently or at least supposedly trained with a brand of radical Islamists in Yemen.  This was well know enough that the CIA had it's own loose file on the man, especially after his father went to a friend at the American embassy urging that his son could become dangerous.  Abdulmutallab nonetheless acquired a crude bomb made of an explosive powerful out of all proportion to its accessibility, and secured it within a pair of very nasty looking tighty whiteys.  He purchased a one-way flight itinerary from Nigeria to Amsterdam to Detroit, in cash, for more than $3000, and passed through each airport with his bomber briefs secured and no luggage.  The goal was abundantly obvious - create a dire spectacle of fear and vulnerability, by suicidally destroying another airliner on a notable day.

Shortly before arriving at Detroit, Abdulmutallab slipped back to the bathrooms to make final adjustments to his device (which was probably riding up on him by then).  He returned to his seat, covered himself in a blanket, and attempted to ignite his bomb.  At this point, the passengers noticed his odd behavior and supposedly an open flame (how he got a lighter is another mystery), and stopped him from detonating.  He was quickly taken into custody upon landing, confessed much of what he could ever say, and has now been arraigned on several heinous charges by a Michigan federal grand jury.  The rest is history, as they will someday say after the history happens.

There's a lot of gigantic, terrifying variations of Why? floating around within this incident.  Many of the questions raised easily lead to hollow screeds of partisanship, nationalism, and anti-nationalism, which I will not tolerate, much less encourage.  I'm driving this thread, and we'll turn right around and go home if anyone gets pissy.  I'm more than willing to entertain any discussion anyone cares to have, so long as it remains rational, reasonable, and dialectically equitable.  I know this is doomed to failure, but I'm always willing to try.

However, I know this is one pretty safe question to ask about what happened, and it's the one that gave me the idea.  Abdulmutallab made it all the way onto an airplane with his bomb and a way of setting it off.  He reached his target without incident or suspicion.  Right before the moment of truth, he retreated to the absolute privacy of the lavatory to prepare his device with no one the wiser.  He could have fulfilled his mission right then and there.  Instead, he went back and made a laughable attempt at subterfuge in the middle of the cabin where he was easily stopped.  The question that bugs me is... why?  In addition to all the other why's about this character, but that's a good place to start.

[Cthulhu]

The man tried to blow up his junk.  It's clear he was a few wraps short of a turban.  That's my explanation for the lack of blowing-up-in-bathroom.

[ToonyMan]

He used the underwear to sneak the bomb in undetected Cthulhu.

What I want to know is why he had such difficulty igniting it.

EDIT: I said suck instead of such.

[Akigagak]

Sweat on the fuse?

[DJ]

Seriously, how do you sneak a bomb onto an airplane and then fail to detonate it? It's just too out there for me to comprehend, so I'll just don my tin foil hat and say it was all orchestrated by the government because they want to pass even stricter laws.

[kuro_suna]

My guess is a underwear load of PETN can't destroy a airliner unless it severs a critical control line, a window seat near the wing will have the ailerons controls and fuel lines under it, the toilet just has sewage tanks below it.

Seriously, how do you sneak a bomb onto an airplane and then fail to detonate it?

A improvised bomb made from tang and rubbing alcohol with a fuse stuffed in it is more likely to fail than real military explosive. If anything this is a good sign since it means al-qaeda is hurting and short on competent personal.

[DJ]

Wait, it couldn't breach the hull? Sudden decompression would seriously mess up the plane.

[bjlong]

There's also a psychological aspect to it--if he detonated the bomb in the toilet, it would seem to him like simple suicide, since noone else is in view.

My question: How did he get a lighter *and* the bomb through security? Was the casing made entirely out of plastic or something?

[kuro_suna]

Wait, it couldn't breach the hull? Sudden decompression would seriously mess up the plane.

The outer hull of a aircraft is actually fairly strong and a improvised bomb will have nowhere near the power or precision of something like plastic explosives used by a trained military engineer.

[Neonivek]

Seriously, how do you sneak a bomb onto an airplane and then fail to detonate it? It's just too out there for me to comprehend, so I'll just don my tin foil hat and say it was all orchestrated by the government because they want to pass even stricter laws.

A few people suspect that many stories of people getting caught on/in Airports are made up because of the outlandish situations they often construct.

In this case it would be made up as a justification for the new X-ray scanners so no one will complain about them because of the Brief bomber. (assuming it was fake)

Which frankly sounds plausable. It wouldn't be the first time the News/Government/Corp fabricated a news story (Not conspiracy Theory. You can look them up) for their own ends.

[kuro_suna]

Seriously, how do you sneak a bomb onto an airplane and then fail to detonate it? It's just too out there for me to comprehend, so I'll just don my tin foil hat and say it was all orchestrated by the government because they want to pass even stricter laws.

A few people suspect that many stories of people getting caught on/in Airports are made up because of the outlandish situations they often construct.

In this case it would be made up as a justification for the new X-ray scanners so no one will complain about them because of the Brief bomber. (assuming it was fake)

Which frankly sounds plausable. It wouldn't be the first time the News/Government/Corp fabricated a news story (Not conspiracy Theory. You can look them up) for their own ends.

Privacy issues aside I don't see how having a registry of the nations genitals would help a government consolidate its power.

[Aqizzar]

Which frankly sounds plausable. It wouldn't be the first time the News/Government/Corp fabricated a news story (Not conspiracy Theory. You can look them up) for their own ends.

This is exactly the kind of ill-conceived knee jerk wingnuttery I didn't want in my thread.  You don't get to just say "the government's out to get ya man".  You have to provide a argument, complete with rational motive and actual evidence.  Because right now, what you have against you is the completely logical chain of events presented, the testimony of the guy's father, the testimony of the bomber himself, President Obama's coldly angered response to his own apparatus, and the slew of sheepish admissions by department spokesmen about how the myriad American intelligence agencies could have stopped the guy but never got around to telling each other about him.

[Nilocy]

Well, theres two situations here:

The government orchestrated this... which in all honesty when you think about it its pretty shitly executed, completely low key and theres so much evidence to prove against this; the guys dad warned the US embassy, the CIA already had a file on him for a very very long time. And they use this as an excuse to increase security in airports... wooooo, like we didn't already have it coming?

Or, there was some nasty people out there that wanted to prove a point. But failed doing so because a bunch of civilians managed to stop him. And they roll out these body scanners that have been waiting in warehouses for about TWO YEARS because they don't want anything like this to happen again.

[zchris13]

Aqizzar. You came to the internet and expected anything else?

[Leafsnail]

Why didn't he blow himself up earlier?  It's a good question.  It's thought that the plane was low enough to land safely even if the device had successfully detonated.  Perhaps he was busy praying for what he thought would be the last time, and lost track of what time it was.  Or perhaps he was having regrets - the survival instinct is, after all, quite strong, and it's going to be pretty difficult to insert a syringe knowing it's going to kill you.

As for him being on a watch list... do we know how many people are on this watch list?  There maybe thousands, and it could be that it wouldn't make sense to stop them all from flying.  Then again, they were warned by the British authorities and the man's own father...