“Victory is not gained by the number killed, but by the number frightened”

- Arab Proverb

The explosion that raced through the second floor apartment of the 3/11 terrorists in the waning hours of April 3rd – taking each of their lives before blasting out several dozen windows and being forever immortalized by the rolling cameras of the Spanish media – never would’ve happened if not for those damn alarm clocks.

If you’ve ever relied on an alarm clock to wake up, chances are you’ve ended up being late to wherever you were supposed to. Be it to class, work, or an appointment, because of that alarm clock. Or, more accurately, because of you. As devilishly simple as they are to set, you can probably relate to the fact that one simple feature of theirs has probably, at some point, resulted in you showing up somewhere late. Since most alarm clocks on the shelves these days lack a military-time setting, when you’re setting the alarm for the next morning you’ve got to be careful to make sure you’ve toggled the AM–PM selection carefully.

Because if you screw this up, the alarm you set to go off at 7:40 in the morning will actually trigger twelve hours later – at 7:40 in the evening. Which is the exact mistake the 3/11 bombers made when they were arming the bomb they left in the El Pozo station that March morning.

i                               i                          i

At 7:40PM, inside a blue-cloth leather-handled gym-bag buried in a pile of unclaimed belongings at the El Pozo station, and twelve hours to the minute after eleven other bombs claimed 191 lives, the Spanish police, to their hasty chagrin, uncovered the alarm attached to one last bomb. Urgently sounding its strident tone – but harmlessly – as in addition to incorrectly toggling the AM-PM function, the bomb had been faultily wired.

And so the same mistake which has probably at some point resulted in your being chewed out by a boss or teacher helped save the lives of a few dozen policemen, standing mouths open and sweat beading on their foreheads over a beeping bag in the lost-and-found bin on the morning of March 11th. Spanish police pulled out the SIM chips from the back of the cell phone attached to this bomb and from the cell phones found as components of two other bombs that failed to detonate because of faulty wiring. They were able to trace these chips to the store where the phones were purchased. Information gleaned from this store provided the first lead and led to the arrest of three of the terrorist cell members before the sun set on March 11th, but the rest of the cell managed to elude arrest.

Until a tip led police to the Madrid suburb of Leganes. Here the 3/11 cell held the police off in a stand-off that was occasionally punctuated by the spray of machine guns across the apartment courtyard and which lasted for several hours. The standoff made for incredible evening news, as every single Spanish media outlet and several international ones covered the event with cameras rolling. Then in the last moments of the evening, as special agents were executing the final steps of a dramatic raid on the apartment, the terrorists detonated what would be their last explosion – a Masada in front of rolling cameras. A Masada for all the world to see.