Al-Qaeda, We Can See What You're Hiding Down There: Go Crotchless

It is human nature to focus on negative or undesirable consequences of an event. So often, especially as Americans, we complain about the state of affairs and how nothing the government is doing is helping us.

Take the Arab Spring, for instance. On the one hand the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical organization, has taken power. On the other hand (the often overlooked one) Egypt is slowly but surely stabalizing.

Today, in the Age of Information, we have come to expect immediate results, and have become less accepting to letting history take its course. Instead of allowing General Motors to file bankrupcy and fail which would have forced the company to restructure, our president authorized a bailout of the company, later using "General Motors is alive" as his misguided campaign slogan. Prominent Capitalists, including Mitt Romney, were against this approach because, in the words of Nassim Taleb, big, sloppy businesses failing will make other businesses stronger, assuming the businesses are not dependent on each other. In other words, Capitalism should be allowed to run its course--except, of course, in case where not rescuing a business will have catastrophic consequences (E.G. banks.)

The same philosophy applies to Egypt. For a government to evolve it takes time, but every so often we see an outburst of anger from the West when something goes on in Egypt that appears to move the country away from progress.

In fact, we are so used to jumping up and down over "the Middle East is this" and "those radical jihadists need to die" that we fail to realize how much our government is doing back home to keep us safe.

A new key detail has emerged in the foiled underwear bomb plot: NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports that a CIA informant posed as a suicide bomber in order to persuade the al-Qaida branch in Yemen to hand over a new, more sophisticated underwear bomb.

The operation was a joint effort between the CIA and Saudi Arabian intelligence and once the informant received the bomb, he "arranged to deliver the explosive device to U.S. and other intelligence authorities waiting in another country, officials said Tuesday."

Officials have said that the bomber had been instructed by al-Qaida to choose a U.S.-bound flight to target but that the bomber, who we now know was a double agent, had not yet bought his tickets.

Because of the Christmas Day bomber, the CIA got smarter and infiltrated Al-Qaeda's ranks even deeper than they already had. They managed to stop another attempted airplane bombing. This is an example of a success story where possibly hundreds of people who were boarding a plane were saved because of the CIA's work.

Notice also that this was a "joint effort" with, of all places, Saudi Arabia. I don't know if they're cooperating because they are stakeholders in the U.S. economy or if they genuinely want to stop terrorists; nonetheless, I was glad to see that they actually do work with the CIA.

Next time you feel like security measures put in place aren't helping, think of this story. It definitely changed my mind.