Monday links
Too much to do to provide a full post today, but I wanted to link to some stories of interest, leading off with the (nonexistent) plot to attack Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The Washington Times first broke the story:
Fort Huachuca, the nation's largest intelligence-training center, changed security measures in May after being warned that Islamist terrorists, with the aid of Mexican drug cartels, were planning an attack on the facility.
Fort officials changed security measures after sources warned that possibly 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists were to be smuggled into the U.S. through underground tunnels with high-powered weapons to attack the Arizona Army base, according to multiple confidential law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington Times.
"A portion of the operatives were in the United States, with the remainder not yet in the United States," according to one of the documents, an FBI advisory that was distributed to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, Customs and Border Protection and the Justice Department, among several other law enforcement agencies throughout the nation. "The Afghanis and Iraqis shaved their beards so as not to appear to be Middle Easterners."
According to the FBI advisory, each Middle Easterner paid Mexican drug lords $20,000 "or the equivalent in weapons" for the cartel's assistance in smuggling them and their weapons through tunnels along the border into the U.S. The weapons would be sent through tunnels that supposedly ended in Arizona and New Mexico, but the Islamist terrorists would be smuggled through Laredo, Texas, and reclaim the weapons later.
A number of the Afghans and Iraqis are already in a safe house in Texas, the FBI advisory said.
Pretty serious stuff: believable and predictable, something like what people (including me) concerned with border security have been warning of since 9/11. Trouble is, it was a false alarm:
A plot by dozens of foreign terrorists who purportedly planned to attack Fort Huachuca with rocket propelled grenades and mines has proved unfounded, an FBI spokesman said Monday.
Ooops. While this is embarrassing for the Times (and those border-hawk bloggers who started shrieking at the first news), it doesn't change the possibility that something like this could one day happen, nor does it change the fact that our porous borders are a major weakness. Al Qaeda and Hizbullah (the latter at least being a proxy for Iran) are in Latin America, and only a fool would think they won't try to exploit the border's weakness to attack us.
The plot against Fort Huachuca was a false alarm, but it was not a Chicken Little moment.
(More at Captain's Quarters, LGF, Power Line, and Hot Air.)
Meanwhile, I want to say, with deepest respect for the Anglican Church, that the Archbishop of Canterbury is an ignorant fool. Victor Davis Hanson explains why.
What is it about left-leaning Western intellectual elites that makes them hate their own civilization so much that they act as if they believe it should apologize for everything it's ever done and go out of existence?
To quote French intellectual Jean Francois Revel: A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.
The Archbishop often acts like it isn't even worth defending.
(More at Blue Crab Boulevard here and here. Melanie Phillips asks "With defenders of western civilisation like this, who needs enemies?" Indeed.)
Finally, is the prison-camp regime in North Korea about to collapse? It's been predicted before and hasn't happened, and, frankly, our intelligence agencies have pretty miserable records when it comes to prognostication (they missed the fall of the Soviet Union, for example), so I'll believe it when I see it. But, there are some tell-tale signs that the regime of Psychopath for Life Dear Leader may be planning for life after the fall. When dictators and thugs start squirreling money away, you know they're worried. And if rumors of American and South Korean troop movements are true, then the West may be taking it seriously this time, too.
(More at Blue Crab Boulevard.)
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