What Terrorists? part II

Arianna herself entered the fray with this post.

There was no set plan. There was no financing. They didn't have any explosives -- and yet government officials were quoted calling the amorphous plot "one of the most chilling plots imaginable" that almost "resulted in unfathomable damage, deaths, and destruction." And people wonder why the public has become cynical about how the war on terror is being used for political purposes.

Keith Olbermann on MSNBC Countdown went even further, speculating that the arrests were made to distract the country from the real story of the weekend - the second Democratic debate. Note to Olbermann - I'm a political junkie and I'm not bothering to watch the debates. The candidates will be chosen by the time Ohio has its primary.

Olbermann's conclusion is inevitable if you start with the premise that there are no home-grown terrorists. Of course, once you start down that road you quickly find yourself part of the 9/11 Truth crowd who believe that the US government killed 3,000 of its own citizens.

Arianna is at least closer to reality but she misses a couple of important points. This is the first one:

The damage to people and property itself would have been minimal - it was the intention that was grand. These men hoped for an act of destruction so great that it would actually minimize the devastation and dwarf the trauma of 9/11.

The other point is related and is really important. Six years ago a group like this one could have hooked up with al Qaeda and gotten some expert advice. Since the invasion of Afghanistan, al Qaeda has broken up into numerous small cells. I don't know how many news reports I have seen telling what a disaster this is - with a decentralized structure we will never find all of the cells.

It works the other way, also. With smaller cells and no over-all structure, there is no one for the home-grown terrorists to turn to for training and expertise. They are left on their own, making it up as they go along and getting caught when they make basic mistakes.

This is something you will never hear Huffington admit. To Arianna and her crowd, there was never any threat in the first place so it cannot have been reduced. She quotes New York Mayor Bloomberg as saying "You can't sit there and worry about everything. Get a life. You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist."

That may be true, but thunder storms don't sit up late nights thinking of ways to kill more people. 9/11 happened because the authorities assumed that nothing bad could ever happen.