Analyst's note: In Times Square, we recently had a contractor (vendors) or two who protected the area from what should have been a massive bomb. Wasn't there something about an underwear bomber just a few months ago who was discovered by another American (non-federal employee)?. Then prior to that something I remember about a jihadist shooter who although known as an Islamist extremist, he managed to kill several at Fort Hood. Oh well .... the Times Square jihadist bomber probably only thought he was setting off a small explosion in celebration of the ground-zero mosque that is now under consideration.
It is extremely hard to imagine, but our massive federal gov't (including a "super-sized" intelligence community) were no where to be found as potentially unpatriotic street vendor(s) -- not federal employees -- were found protecting the civilian population in the area. Perhaps you get my point here regarding today's Top Secret America Part II report by The Washington Post?
Regarding the correct detonation of the bomb in Times Square, it is said that,
"It would have been the biggest thing ever to happen in this country since Sept. 11" [...] "It definitely would have been bigger than [the 1995] Oklahoma City" bombing of the federal building that killed 168 people, [...]
" [...] A secret FBI test of a correctly made version of the Times Square bomb revealed that it "would have killed thousands of people" if it had been made to explode as terrorists had intended, law-enforcement sources told The Post yesterday.
"This attempt failed," one source said. "But no one thinks this is the only time someone is going to try to blow something up in Times Square."
Had he built the Times Square device the way he had originally intended to, terrorist Faisal Shahzad, would have turned his SUV and nearby vehicles into a fatal spray of razor-sharp fragments and transformed building windows into glass guillotines hurtling to the streets, cutting down hundreds of people walking by.
