New strategy for down-playing UK terror plot at Daily Kos

Instead of saying that the plot was fake, let's say it never could have succeeded:

Let's stipulate that I was a wee bit skeptical about the whole Hellzapoppin' at Heathrow thing from the very beginning - most particularly because of the timing and shrillness of the announcements that an evildoer's plot had been busted. Taken at face value, it seems pretty clear that a group of disgruntled locals in Great Britain were in an early phase of ginning up some kind of a plan for using binary explosives to bring down airliners bound for the U.S. The problem (as demonstrated by the failure of Ramsey Yousef's Version 0.95 of the plot) is that it's very hard to compartmentalize a complex operation such as this, and not tip off someone during the planning process. There are too many fingers involved, too much communication needed, and I'm sure that there were at least a few intelligence operatives embedded at the fringes of the group that was planning the attack.

There are two problems with this argument. The first is that a number of large-scale, simultaneous-target attacks *have* succeeded: 9/11, 7/7, the attack in Spain. The second problem is that pointing out the drawbacks to one specific kind of attack doesn't address the overall continuing threat from terror and the willingness of native-born European Muslims to become involved in terrorism.

The author, Richard Cranium, goes on to comment "The scale of the operation was such that it was almost inevitable that it would be discovered." He then quotes an MSNBC story which states the following:

U.S. and British officials say this group was under such close surveillance that the police virtually held the on/off switch, able to shut it down at will....

British investigators were monitoring Internet cafes the terror suspects used, keeping tabs on the flow of their money, and watching their travel and phone calls...

Such tight control, U.S. officials say, that after months of intense surveillance there was almost no chance any of the plotters could have actually carried out their attacks...

This doesn't exactly say that the plot was intrinsically unworkable, but rather that the authorities had a good grip on this particular plot. A foiled-plot is a foiled-plot. You can emphasize what might have happened or you can emphasize that it didn't happen. I don't see how any reasonable person can deny that we are faced with a real and serious threat.

Tags: UK, Terror, Islam, Daily Kos