An attempted terrorist attack that should reassure us

The announcement of the arrest of a terror suspect is always disconcerting, but the one revealed today has some silver linings. First a recap:

A 20-year-old Saudi student who was arrested in Lubbock, Tex., late Wednesday was close to constructing a bomb and had researched a range of possible targets including the Dallas home of former president George W. Bush and the residences of three Americans who served in the military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, authorities said.

Khalid Aldawsari, who recently transferred from a chemical engineering program at Texas Tech to a business studies program at South Plains College in Lubbock, arrived in the United States on a student visa in September 2008 with the ultimate goal of killing Americans, according to journal entries cited in an FBI affidavit.

The first silver lining is, of course, that he was caught. It reaffirms a substantial improvement in domestic terrorist detection since 9/11. The system is not perfect and never will be, but many more plots are disrupted than ever reach the stage where they could be carried out. The FBI should be commended for a job well done, as should the chemical company which tipped off the Bureau to a suspicious purchase.

On a related note, the perp matches the general sketch of a likely terrorist, which makes the job of detection easier. He’s an engineering student, like so many terrorists. He is a native of a Muslim country but lived in the U.S., where presumably he became radicalized. This made him another “lone wolf,” a man inspired by bin Laden but not trained in a Pashtun-speaking area.

Reports also match his personality with the archetype of recent terrorists — quiet, a good student, but maybe a little bit “off.” He also looked to the Internet to vent his frustrations and extremist views, which others, like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Christmas Day fame, were known to do.

All in all, it seems like our domestic counterterrorist apparatus (including the first line of defense — private citizens) has a good handle on what to look for and what do when they see something shady.