The reaction to the failed bombing of a Detroit bound international flight has proven to be more sobering than a fresh reminder that the world is never perfectly secure.  President Obama demonstrated that he will ramp up the useless airport security apparatus to protect his Achilles heel, a second 9/11 that would instantly doom his presidency.  Conservatives embraced Cheney's extraordinary philosophy by complaining that the law wasn't broken.  The media chose to ignore the human interest story - Jasper Schuringa, the heroic passenger who ripped the bomb away from Farouk Abdulmutalla and dragged him out of his seat - in favor of a controversy about what Obama could have done to prevent the attack.

Obama's reaction is understandable, if disappointing.  As I've point out before,  Obama gains nothing politically by rolling security standards back to pre-9/11 levels, even though the gains from airport security are minimal and the costs in making travel intolerable are extreme.  The lesson to be learned from this attempt is not that security should be even more invasive, but that it can never be invasive enough to stop every terrorist.  Airport security can not/will not grope sensitive areas looking for irregularities, so all the rigmarole they put us through is just an act, "security as theater" to borrow Bruce Scheiner's phrase.  Even the new full body scanners that will no doubt be rushed into service in response to this attack can not change this reality.  If a terrorist  stuck a bomb into his underwear, another will surely swallow one or hide one in their anus.  Our humanity constrains us, they have left their humanity behind.

At best, the increased security means terrorists can not get combat weapons on the plane, making it easier for passengers to subdue them when they present themselves as a threat.  The passengers clearly have become the real air terror deterrent.  This marked the third time in a row, with United 93 and the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, that passengers foiled a terrorist plot, clearly after 9/11 everyone knows to fight back.  That should be the poignant image of this attack, people who were going about their lives courageously overcoming the violence of the misguided and deranged, not the "failure to connect the dots" on the part of the Obama administration.

That the Conservative criticism of trying Abdulmutalla in civilian court was expected speaks to the debasement of that movement.  Conservatives who should celebrate the constraint of government behind the strict interpretation of the Constitution instead bemoan that a human being wasn't picked apart for useless information.  Far from needing extraordinary circumstances, the ticking bomb scenario, to use extra-legal means of procuring information, Neo-cons conflate every situation with extraordinary.  In this case the argument rested on the time-sensitivity of interrogating Abdulmutalla, since the information he has becomes dated moment by moment.  Using the imperfection of Abdulmutalla's intelligence as the pretense for torture is a flimsy reason to abandon the rule of law, but when reason rests on an irrational fear used to justify an unnecessary course of action it will always be flimsy.  

The hue and cry over the terrorist attack that did not happen proves that Obama is right to worry; the chorus of "told ya so" that would greet a fresh terror attack after Obama softened the approach to the war on terror would be a deafening cacophony of misinformation, blame and condemnation.  Remember when people rallied around the President after a terror attack?  How quaint.