Thursday, March 6, 2008

Explosion Wakes Up Times Square

Around 3:43 a.m. this morning, a homemade explosive device detonated in the heart of Times Square, right in front of the Armed Forces Career Center. The recruitment office was damaged, but thankfully no one was injured.

According to this breaking story in The New York Times, the police and F.B.I. are investigating whether there is any connection between this latest explosion and two earlier bombings in the City - the 2005 blast outside the British Consulate on Third Avenue and the two dummy grenades that rocked the Mexican Consulate on 39th Street in October 2007.

The government has yet to declare this morning's bombing a terrorist attack - meaning that they can't link it to al-Qaeda - but, given the targets, there is no question that the perpetrator or perpetrators of these attacks had a political agenda. Personally, these bombings seem a lot less to me the work of Muslim extremists than the acts of domestic terrorists - like what Brooklyn Heights resident Ivaylo Ivanov may have had in mind for his arsenal on Remsen Street. Let us not forget that before 9/11 the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil - the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City - was perpetrated by disaffected Americans who deluded themselves into believing they were revolutionaries.

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