1115.org

In the first flush of uproar over the London liquid explosives plot – a first flush that managed to last several days, spanning the weekend and emerging on the other side with no noticeable loss of momentum – all kinds of things were said by administration officials, Republicans in Congress, members of the national security apparatus, and the groupies of all these groups. Some of those things have now turned out to sound like exaggerations, some of them have turned out to sound like lies. Some people are angry, but no one seems to be surprised.

Andrew Sullivan, who isn’t exactly a Ned Lamont type al Qaeda sympathizer, had a post on Wednesday explaining why the sensible attitude to the London plot allegations at this point in time is probably polite skepticism. Here’s what he himself calls the money quote, from a blog post by Craig Murray, who was Tony Blair’s ambassador to Uzbekistan:

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn’t be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn’t give is the truth …

We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend (that’s the weekend before the news broke on Thursday the 10th; this is what Murray’s referring to). Why?

Sullivan ends his post with his answer to that question:

I wonder if Lieberman’s defeat, the resilience of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the emergence of a Hezbollah-style government in Iraq had any bearing on the decision by Bush and Blair to pre-empt the British police and order this alleged plot disabled. I wish I didn’t find these questions popping into my head. But the alternative is to trust the Bush administration.

Kevin Drum had a post at Washington Monthly on Thursday in which he quoted from an AP story. Here’s a slightly different set of quotes from there:

Two top Pakistani intelligence agents said Wednesday that the would-be bombers wanted to carry out an al-Qaida-style attack to mark the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 strikes, but were too “inexperienced” to carry out the plot.
[…]
The detainees in Britain and Pakistan had not attended terror-training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan and had relied on information gleaned from text books on how to make bombs, the officials said.

Their comments offer a different perspective from that given by U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “Certainly in terms of the complexity, the sophistication, the international dimension and the number of people involved, this plot has the hallmarks of an al-Qaida-type plot,” Chertoff said Friday.

My guess is that it doesn’t happen very often that the Associated Press calls out a Cabinet Secretary for feeding the public a flat out lie in the interests of scare-mongering.

And how interesting is it that most of the “evidence” of the bomb plot as it was described to us comes from a Pakistani interrogation, but top Pakistani intelligence agents themselves don’t really believe the plotters were going to be able to do much more than talk about blowing up planes with liquid explosives? As Kevin Drum puts it, the jokers who were rounded up at the behest of B & B lacked “serious operational capacity”.

Drum ends his post with:

So: was this a serious conspiracy? Or was it like the plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge that turned out to be a mentally disturbed dude with a blowtorch? Or the financial district alert in New York City that turned out to be based on information more than three years old? Or the plot to blow up the Sears Tower that turned out to be “more aspirational than operational”? Or Jose Padilla? What news about this plot are we going to discover buried on page A13 a couple of weeks from now?

I won’t pretend to know what to think about the way this has been handled. Was it about winning elections? Building public support for draconian security legislation? Plain old bureaucratic incompetence?

Or was it real?

As they used to say in the good old days, you be the judge. (Of course, these days, the refrain is more like: “There, there, don’t you worry about it now. We’ll be the judge, and we’ll be the jury. If necessary, we’ll be the executioner too. Trusssst in us. Jusssst in us.” )