Lucy and the football

Anyone asking how exactly we know to trust the people who told us about this plot?

Just as a matter of procedure, y'know, Trust but verify.

So depressing to watch the cable news nets yesterday. These guys are PUMPED. This is what they do best--sow fear in business travelers.

On MSNBC they trotted out a couple of "terror analysts" whose comments struck me as bizarrely scripted.

Hey, all that they say about this plot may be true, or it may all be about domestic politics again, on both sides of the pond.

Given the limited info we have (and we'll be reliant on what other data UK and US intelligence deigns to release), here's a pretty good rumination from Rigorous Intuition:

The crawl on MSNBC Thursday night read Terror in the Sky: Mass Murder on an Unimaginable Scale! Well, no; and I mean no to everything.

There is no terror in the sky, unless you're Iraqi or Lebanese, or reside in northern Israel or any of the world's other free-fire zones and might expect to see death fall from it. Or unless we can include the sky itself, churning with strange weather and unwholesome artifacts, and a sun that now seems to burn an alien white. Because if we look up, we may just catch our breath.

The mass murder never was, and the unimaginable scale! was imagined more than ten years ago, and given the name Project Bojinka. Substitute the Pacific for the Atlantic, and toss in the assassination of the Pope and the crashing of a plane into CIA headquarters for good measure, and you have a thwarted operation that's earned its exclamation point. But 2006 isn't 1995, and today citizens of the great crusader nations must be reminded, repeatedly and at the pleasure of their minders, just how vulnerable they are, and therefore dependent upon the same dark mills of empire that intentionally exacerbate those vulnerabilities.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," boasts a naturally unnamed White House official in the AFP story "Bush Seeks Political Gains from Foiled Plot." Bush and Blair conferred last weekend on the "imminent attack" (though neither man was sufficiently moved to break off their vacations), and the White House tooled its response to Joe Lieberman's defeat at the hands of a "far left" cut 'n runner accordingly. The thwarting of the plot (with a man inside, as is the custom in plots both thwarted and unthwarted) became itself a time bomb, rigged to detonate in the faces of populist leaders who even modestly reflect the now conventional wisdom that the war is an abject failure (at least according to how failure is conventionally understood). This would be a reminder and an example that the threat is real, though the threat was no less real - and possibly more real - when Bojinka was foiled in 1995.

Last night on the RI forum, "sunny" wondered "So, if the plot was foiled, why was the terror alert raised? That in itself tells me everything I need to know."

Let one happen, stop the rest. Should we to be grateful then that, for whatever reason, they stop some?