Above is a screen shot from this morning’s Memeorandum front page. Classic, huh?
In brief, the New York Times story says the JFK bomb plot was over-hyped. The plotters wanted to carry out a terrible terrorist act, but they had little capability of doing so. The Telegraph story says that Americans have reason to fear “the twin dangers of Muslim Islamists holding American passports and plots with links to other countries.” Same event; two entirely different stories.
That said, as a resident of the New York City area who takes flights into and out of the local airports I am very happy that law enforcers are watching the airports so closely that even half-assed terror plots are nipped in the bud. I don’t have a problem with that at all. I just wish the FBI would stop with the hyping. There’s more than a whiff of propaganda about it. And I worry that if the FBI is focused on busting amateur plots it can hype, maybe they’re not noticing what the pros are up to.
Related: Joseph Cannon of Cannon Fire suspects the “terrorists” may have actually been drug traffickers.
Update: The hysteria continues — this rightie lunatic fringe site announces that some of the JFK plotters are east Indian, but the news story linked as proof of this says no such thing. Then the rightie tries to link the plotters to some Hindu terrorists operating in India, even though all the news stories about the JFK plotters say they are Sunni Muslim. Weird. Well, OK, stupid.
I’m also disturbed by the hype. There’s plenty to worry about in this story, but the cinematic destruction of JFK and Queens isn’t it. I guess it’s easier for the officials to hype “unfathomable destruction!”than to calmly discuss the threat of home-grown crazies who go seeking support from abroad, and what this case means in terms of radicalism in the Caribbean.
I’d feel more confident if they were treating this case as business-as-usual, and telling us how they were on top of the plot early, that the plotters were badly organized, that the plan was not feasible and that the existing security procedures would have prevented the attempt anyway.