Was it bureaucratic ineptitude?

Or was it something more sinister?

Seems the Times Square (almost) bomber, Faisal Shahzad nearly got beyond the borders of the US. DESPITE BEING ON THE NO FLY LIST. No second look by the TSA, despite the fact that he was paying cash for a last minute ticket with no luggage. This sort of behavior would get me "special attention", and no doubt my tonsils massaged from the wrong end by an unsmiling man with a long rubber glove, if you know what I mean.

So were the TSA folks inept? Or were they supposed to let him pass? Perhaps the FBI and the rest of the alphabet folks were just good enough to catch him, despite the fact that the way was cleared for him....

And one wonders, how could the authorities have dropped the ball regarding this guy? He was a whole bunch or red flags, yet no one bothered to look. I thought the reorganization post 9-11 was supposed to be taking care of this...

I mean, as so many others have pointed out, the fact is that this was a childlike method of making a bomb. Fer chrissake, had most any kid from the midwest decided to make a device such as this, the damned thing would probably have worked, and there would be dead or injured being tended to right now, either in funeral homes or hospitals.

One might wonder if this was a false flag operation designed to create a stir without actually hurting anyone. To perhaps take the focus off the AZ Immigration debacle? To hide something else? It has taken up several days of news cycle already, to the exclusion of nearly all other topics.

If yer tinfoil hat is tight enough, you can begin to wonder...

Or then again; perhaps we should remember this quote, with "incompetence" substituted for "stupidity":

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"