What happened
A small bomb shook Times Square and shattered the glass facade of a military recruiting station on New York City’s Broadway early Thursday. No one was injured. Surveillance video from a nearby building showed someone riding up on a bicycle and apparently planting the bomb shortly before the explosion. (The Boston Globe, free registration) Investigators were searching for links to letters received by members of Congress that included a photo of the recruiting center and the words, “We did it.” New York police are looking into whether there was any connection to similar bombings at the British Consulate in 2005 and the Mexican Consulate last year. (The New York Times, free registration)
What the commentators said
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There’s plenty of speculation about who planted this bomb, said Investor's Business Daily in an editorial. “Islamic extremists? Groups affiliated with Code Pink, Ruckus, Recreate '68, and other extreme left-wing groups?” It seems most likely that the bike-riding “nut” behind this attack is somehow connected to the far left, whose “apocalyptic rhetoric and verbal violence” is “starting to be translated into acts of terrorism” that could soon kill someone “if we don’t stop it now.”
There’s reason to speculate that an antiwar group such as Code Pink is the “most likely culprit,” said John Hinderaker in the Power Line blog. So far, there are no suspects, and this could be the handiwork of Islamist extremists. But antiwar groups have been stepping up the “virulence” of their criticism of the military recently, and antiwar protesters have expressed their views outside the Times Square frequently since the start of the Iraq war.
That kind of speculation is “criminally irresponsible,” said Steven Reynolds in the All Spin Zone blog. There are “zero facts behind it,” and it only “riles up the whack jobs” on the radical right wing who, by the way, are the ones responsible for the “vast majority” of this nation’s “home-grown terrorism.”
