Fortunately, no one was hurt, but it appears that someone detonated a small explosive device outside a military recruiting station in Times Square early this morning. Nearly as interesting was how ideologues chose to exploit the incident for political gain.
A small explosion damaged a U.S. military recruiting station but caused no injuries in New York’s Times Square before dawn on Thursday, triggering a Pentagon alert for other stations across the country.
“We’re treating it as if it were an incident of vandalism,” Army spokesman Paul Boyce said at the Pentagon.
Times Square — the normally bustling “Crossroads of the World” with shops, restaurants, hotels, theaters and office towers — was largely empty when the crude bomb went off at around 3:45 a.m. EST.
Low-grade explosives packed in an ammunition box cracked the recruiting station’s thick glass door and twisted its metal framing, police said. The blast also shattered a window encasing the classic poster of Uncle Sam saying “I Want You,” but did not expose the interior of the office.
Authorities are reportedly looking for a man in a gray hooded sweatshirt who was seen leaving the scene on a bicycle.
And while it seems pretty irresponsible to start speculating about the political motivations of the criminal, it didn’t take long at all for certain segments to start speculating about the political motivations of the criminal.
For example, some conservatives found a dKos commenter — not a diarist, mind you, but a commenter adding his or her two cents to someone else’s diary thread — pointing to the right.
INCITE the violence, or to trigger arranged mob responses, and make sure it all gets pinned on the Left. And the right seems to be able to get the FBI and law enforcement to do this for them as well. Anarchy, chaos, property damage, physical harm, mayhem, murder, militarized police with massive crowd control equipment, are all ‘options’ the right are eager to use to shut down any potentially energizing movement.
Several conservatives were outraged, not because someone was trying to exploit the crime for political purposes, but because the right wanted to exploit the crime to go after the left. Power Line, for its part, quickly identified its likely suspects.
Islamic Extremists or Code Pinkers? Those groups appear to be the most likely suspects in a bombing in Times Square early this morning. Someone set off an “improvised explosive device” in front of the military recruiting station there; the bomb blew a hole in the building’s door. No one was hurt.
The Times Square recruiting station “has been the site of regular antiwar protests since the start of the Iraq war.” Given the increasing virulence of attacks on the military and on military recruiting facilities by antiwar groups like Code Pink, most notably the repeated confrontations in Berkeley, one could speculate that a liberal group is the most likely culprit.
Can we not wait until there’s at least a suspect in custody before playing politics with “an incident of vandalism”?