The Crotch Bomber

by Dennis Green

“Ah, 72 virgins, and I’ve just blown off my penis using an explosive taped to my groin! Allah has a sense of humor after all…”

And over half a million names on a “Suspected Terrorist” watch list? And only 500 of them have gotten into parties at the White House. I’m reminded why I haven’t been on an airliner since 1997. If God had intended humans to fly, he would have given us feathers.

Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallah, whose name alone should have put him on such a list, suffered severe burns to his groin when the explosive chemicals he had hidden in a condom taped to his privates misfired, sending him to the hospital rather than all his fellow passengers to an untimely, Christmas-day grave. And Abdulmutallah had studied as a chemical engineer, but not long or hard enough, apparently.

Terrorist attacks, including the bringing down of the Twin Towers and the airliner crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, have changed our way of life in aspects we’re still trying to understand. Besides the obvious impact on the airlines, and travel, those attacks have changed American politics in ways historians will still be debating a hundred years from now.

Now Abdulmutallah joins Richard Reid, the infamous “Shoe Bomber” in the halls of infamy for trying, and failing, to use the plastic explosive PETN to bring down an airliner. Air passengers are now required to put their shoes on conveyor belts in airports to be scanned, so we can only imagine what this latest attempt will prompt in the way of security measures. “Drop your pants!” while standing in line?

Might be enough to get me back in the airports…

This guy, apparently, received training from Al Qaeda in Yemen, which gives me great assurance that such training camps are turning out incompetents as fast as CIA headquarters. Meanwhile, another Predator drone attack by the U.S. in Pakistan may or may not have killed extremists it was or war not targeting.

As Senator Joe Lieberman says, “9/11 happened because of a failure of imagination.” And that tells me that we should be employing more artists and imaginative types of people in our security forces, rather than lawyers and military or law-enforcement minded sorts. Former Disney employees perhaps.

And if, as we like to assume, the terrorists are all deranged Islamo-Fascists, perhaps we should employ more neo-Nazi skinheads and the certified mentally insane in our Homeland Security forces. Fight fire with fire.

My concern now is that the terrorists will find a way to combine those deadly chemicals inside the human body, inside the intestines and lower bowels of a suicide bomber. Cocaine mules, after all, often experience a near death experience, or even the real thing, when the balloons filled with cocaine that they swallow burst.

So what’s next? After the Shoe Bomber and the Crotch Bomber we might just get the Bowel Bomber, and even if the explosion is a minor one, contained and restrained by its surrounding tissue, nearby passengers will be splattered by some god-awful mess. Just don’t take a seat near the rest room, or over the fuel tanks.

©2009 Dennis Green