This morning all the news outlets are reporting the arrest of Subash Gurung, who tried to take a stun gun, mace and a slew of knives on to a flight leaving Chicago.
Even more troubling than the Soldier of Fortune value-pak he apparently planned to bring on board was the fact that he used a Chicago address also used by Ayub Ali Khan, one of the two ‘material witnesses’ arrested on an Amtrak train in Texas on September 12th, with $5,500 cash, two box-cutter knives and hair dye. (On the day of the attacks, Khan and his associate Mohamed Jaweed Azmath were on a plane which was grounded after the FAA closed American airspace.)
Perhaps there’s an innocent explanation for this. Or at least a non-terrorist explanation. But here’s the weird part. After being detained and processed Gurung was released on bond!
Now I’m all for civil liberties. But according to this excellent Washington Post article, the Feds are already pursuing a policy of ‘disruption’ in their waves of anti-terrorist arrests. We’ll be saying more about the specifics and rationales behind this soon. But for the moment, let’s just say that this is a policy of arrest, detain and then ask questions later. It’s as much an effort to disrupt the terror network by getting a lot of folks locked up as it is an effort to charge and prosecute particular individuals for particular crimes.
Wouldn’t you think the authorities would have wanted to keep Gurung on ice for a few days? Isn’t this, at the very least, rather inconsistent?
