Strutting and fretting on the early stage

It appears that we should begin to expect a lot more of this in the weeks and months ahead:

A terrorist plot to set off explosives in the PATH railway tunnels under the Hudson River in October or November was disrupted in its planning stages, and several suspects in the plot have been apprehended.

Phew! That sure sounds scary, and maybe it should be, but unfortunately, apartchiks of the Bush administration (and that includes Bloomberg) have cried wolf a few too many times. After the ridiculous, colour-coded "terror alert" program, we have now seen a number of "thwarted plots" announced by the various officials that turned out to be, oh just a tad over-hyped.

Reminiscent of the Miami 7 gang -- the ones who hadn't actually done anything nor had even been to Chicago during the course of their thwarted plot -- we now see that this New York subway plot appears to have been in the "early stages," which means

No one involved in the plot had set foot in the United States. No bomb materials had been acquired and no reconnaissance had been conducted by the plotters.

Now, that's early!

Perhaps I am making too light of this and perhaps this was an actual plot. But I'm afraid the Bush administration has done so much to discredit themselves regarding some of these "plots," almost none of this strikes the fear and/or relief that it proabably is meant to. Apart from the rather pathetic appearance of the Sears Tower plot, can we forget the tale of another thwarted plot Bush himself chose to reveal, a plot that supposedly was going to bring down the Library Tower in Los Angeles? We shouldn't but we probably have. So much the better for Bush and the continuing efforts to drum up the fear factor.

Naturally, Bloomberg took the opportunity to rip the DHS and Chertoff about the recent Homeland Security funding, which almost makes me think that maybe this is what the plot exposure is all about. Who knows? I'm torn by cynicism from any number of directions.

And as I type this, I can hear NPR in the background dutifully informing listeners of how many people ride the NY subway everyday. Oh, the humanity!