Faisal Shahzad

The FBI detonated a bomb in Pennsylvania made of the components Faisal Shahzad intended to use before he resorted to cheaper alternatives. In May, Shahzad left his SUV in the middle of Times Square, where it merely smoked instead of exploding:

Writing at the Daily Beast a few days ago, Philip Shenon (formerly an investigative reporter at the New York Times) had a scoop that deserves wider attention. According to Shenon, a “senior federal law enforcement official” told him that the Obama administration has sent a “clear, if carefully worded warning” to Pakistani leaders.

In the aftermath of the failed Times Square bombing, the world appears--not for the first time--to be catching on about Pakistan. That country’s reality is simple: Radical Islamist movements have a choke-hold over the military and intelligence services, and blackmail Islamabad into subsidizing jihadist activities across South Asia, from Afghanistan to Burma, the latter with a small Muslim community. In addition, the large Pakistani diaspora, mainly in the UK and U.S., shelters numerous active agents of and contributors to terrorist efforts.

On 60 Minutes Sunday night, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made what CBS News rightly called a “remarkable” allegation. Secretary Clinton was first asked if the would-be Times Square bomber had ties to terrorists operating out of Pakistan.  “There are connections,” Clinton responded before expressing some ambiguity as to the precise nature of those connections. (Other senior Obama administration, including Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan clarified those connections earlier in the day.)

 Clinton was asked what message she would deliver to the Pakistanis in the wake of the Times Square attack. She answered:

Early Sunday morning, May 2, I awoke and followed my usual routine: Grabbed a cup of coffee, logged onto my computer, scanned the news for major developments in the war, and checked my email. It was no ordinary morning, though, as the evening before someone had attempted to set off a car bomb in Times Square in New York City. 

Mayor Mike is coming for your guns, but not even this administration -- and this Congress -- is naive enough to play along. Bloomberg appealed to Congress this week to address what is oddly being called the "terror gap," but which supporters of Second Amendment rights better describe as "secret government lists." The question is this: Should U.S. citizens on terror watch lists be allowed to purchase firearms? The answer from Congress is yes (though the Huffington Post and the New York Times would have you believe it's just Republicans obstructing Bloomberg's "common sense" proposal).

Faisal Shahzad on terror list since 1999.

Andy McCarthy wants to know why the criminal complaint was even made public.

Josh Rogin notices that Barack Obama has made the UN more popular in the U.S., while the president's own support wanes.

Byron York notices an alarming paragraph deep inside a New York Times profile of Faisal Shahzad:

George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply “checking everything out.

On Sunday morning, Janet Napolitano twice suggested that the attempted attack in Times Square was a "one-off" event during an interview with ABC News. ABC's Jake Tapper had asked Napolitano directly about the possibility of international involvement, given the similarities (superficial, at least) between the crude bomb discovered in the Nissan Pathfinder in New York City and those used in attempted bombings in London and Glasgow in 2007. "Well, right now, we have no evidence that it is anything other than a one-off, but we are alerting state, local officials around the country, letting them know what is going on."

Calling the attempted attack a "one-off" wasn't directly responsive to Tapper's question. But it's clear that Napolitano, who also described the bomb as "amateurish," wanted to downplay the seriousness of the attack.

While in Washington, D.C. today for fundraising events, Marco Rubio was asked whether Faisal Shahzad, a the alleged Times Square bomber, should be Mirandized.

His initial response was ambivalent. "It all depends on how they're going to try him. And that's an important question that we're facing," Rubio said. "That's one of the great challenges of the war on terror."

An FBI official says Faisal Shahzad was put on a no-fly list hours before his arrest, but he was apprehended on a flight he booked on the way to the airport and which he paid for in cash.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, while refusing to criticize agencies, said the suspect was "clearly on the plane and shouldn't have been." An FBI official said Shahzad was placed on No Fly list hours before his arrest.

Faisal Shahzad, a 30 year-old naturalized American citizen from Pakistan, has been arrested as the chief suspect behind the failed car bomb attack on Times Square this past Saturday.  The good news is, of course, that the bomb was fairly unsophisticated (showing a low-level of expertise), it failed to detonate (sparing the lives of New Yorkers and tourists), and the man believed to be responsible for assembling and deploying the car bomb was apprehended in short order. Authorities were able to pinpoint the would-be terrorist in impressively little time.

It is not all good news, however. Law enforcement and intelligence officials failed to stop the perpetrator from placing his bomb in the first place. We were simply lucky that onlookers weren’t killed. If this was truly the work of a rogue individual, a “one-off” event as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano suggested on Sunday, then that failure would be somewhat understandable. As law enforcement and intelligence professionals have repeatedly lamented, it is exceedingly difficult to stop a “lone wolf” terrorist.