Once again, the Bush Administration and DHS have gamed the media and the public with another bogus "we've kept Amurrica safe from terr'rists!" Page One story that, by day 4, has already begun evaporating into nothing.
You would have had to have been under a pretty big rock late last week to have missed the big "terrorist attack on JFK" almost-disaster. I am sure many New Yorkers breathed a sigh of relief when they saw this.
As many of us observed, this was not the first time we saw a breathless headline about "stopping terrorism" only to find out later that if anything, the DHS broke up a late night bull session that was no real threat to anyone----and in many cases, the "terror plot" was in fact suggested by a law enforcement mole himself.
thumbnail history of our government's relationship to terror
Never mind---the headlines boost the White House profile (at least with what remaining supporters they still have) and serve to legitimize their aggressive militaristic stance.
Today comes word from the New York times that in the words of Gertrude Stein, there's no there there.
But the criminal complaint filed by the federal authorities against the four defendants in the case — one of them, Abdel Nur, remained at large yesterday — suggests a less than mature terror plan, a proposed effort longer on evil intent than on operational capability.
(Ms. Mauskopf noted in her news release that the "public was never at risk" and told reporters that law enforcement "had stopped this plot long before it ever had a chance to be carried out.")
At its heart was a 63-year-old retired airport cargo worker, Russell M. Defreitas, who the complaint says talked of his dreams of inflicting massive harm, but who appeared to possess little money, uncertain training and no known background in planning a terror attack.
"Capability low, intent very high," a law enforcement official said of the suspects.
Some law enforcement officials and engineers also dismissed the notion that the planned attack could have resulted in a catastrophic chain reaction; system safeguards, they said, would have stopped explosions from spreading.
The complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, also suggests that at least two of the suspects had some ambivalence. One of the men was game for bombing the airport but leery about killing masses of people, the complaint says. Another dropped out of the plot for a time to tend to his business.
The suspects had ties with a dangerous Islamic group that once engineered a deadly coup attempt in Trinidad and Tobago, which was approached about underwriting a plot, but in the end, the men decided to stop courting that group and resolved to shop elsewhere overseas for financing.
A "63 year old retired airport cargo worker"? Really, has terrorism becaome the new red convertible for the midlife identity crisis?
Perhaps if "the war on terror" were not endlessly hyped in the media, our disaffected and alienated malcontents (which is what most of these people seem to be, rather than cadres of deadly Osamaphile cells) might conceive of other ways of expressing themselves. Like bowling, maybe.