John Amato astutely asks an excellent question: why are all of the Bush supporters celebrating the unauthorized leak to the Daily News of the FBI's arrests of alleged terrorists who were talking in Internet chat rooms about blowing up the Holland Tunnel (later news reports indicated that the plot was really aimed at the PATH commuter train)?For the same reason that the hubub over the NY Times "leaks," this leak is also not worth getting hububby about. If leaks make you excitable - whether angry or overjoyed - please know that you have just been propagandized. Leaks are political tools, strategically placed for optimum political impact. We can talk about freedom of information and all that, but remember that this is information packaged selectively for popular consumption. Put a bow on top of it, sit back and watch the fireworks.
One Bush follower after the next who has been furiously protesting the publication of leaks by the NYT and other newspapers -- almost all of whom has accused the NYT of treason, of providing aid and comfort to their Al Qaeda friends, etc. for reporting leaked classified information -- have written today about this leaked story. But all of them are ecstatic over this story, celebrating it as a great and heroic blow for the Bush administration and as proof that The Terrorists really are the Epic Threat they've been claiming.
See here anyway:
“The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site,” said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved – “three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere - are indeed extremists," their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.
“They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed," Giraldi added. "Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him.”
2 comments:
The old (quaint, I suppose) way of evaluating threats started with capabilities. It's not clear what the capabilities of this group might have been, but those of the Florida group seem to have ranged from poor to nonexistent.
The old paradigm caused the arms race, because if the Soviet Union had a capability, the United States had to better that, and vice versa.
Capabilities now seem to play little if any part in evaluating "terrorist plots."
New York's police commissioner seemed fairly irritated at the leaks on The News Hour, Thursday night I think it was. He would have preferred to catch the group at something beyond internet chat, something involving capabilities. Must be of the old school.
Prosecution depends on capabilities, too. Catching people with sacks of ammonium nitrate makes conviction more likely than catching them typing into a computer.
CKR
That's interesting, Cheryl. It seems like capability has little to do with it any more. Now, even the thought counts.
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