Washington, May 12 -

Three things strike me about the failed terror bombing in Times Square.

1. We were lucky. Just as with the attempted Christmas Day bombing, there was not one thing that the government did to prevent the bomb from exploding and killing hundreds of people. We should admire the law enforcement work that found and arrested the suspect, but we should not delude ourselves that the government prevented him from being successful. Only his incompetence managed that.

2. We need to use all of the tools we can constitutionally in order to prevent terrorist attacks – not just arrest the terrorist afterwards. The Obama Administration has taken some of the most effective tools – such as the CIA’s interrogation program – off the table. When the next bomb is ticking away in Times Square, we may wish they had not done so.

3. In his book Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century, Marc Sageman wrote in 2008 that:

"The strategy of taking the glory out of terrorism also means putting a stop to press conferences at which representatives from the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security hold self-congratulatory celebration of their newest victories in the 'war on terror.' The press conferences are good for electioneering, but they are counterproductive. Homeland security will be better served through quiet arrests and prosecutions of potential terrorists. This apparent neglect of terrorists and their reduction to common criminals robs them of the stage they crave and undermines the effective promotion of their cause through propaganda by the deed."

The spectacle we witnessed in this case, from the early leaks that endangered the lives of law enforcement personnel trying to find and arrest the suspect to the press conference just as Sageman describes and the continuing leaks about how much the suspect was talking, should not be repeated. It only encourages others to try.