this bomb plot business

[hatam_soferet]

There's a general atmosphere of Scared and Relieved in Riverdale the past few days, since the news broke that some terrists had been Foiled in an Evil Plot to blow up shuls round here.

Call me cynical, but it seems to be a bit too convenient that it made front-page news just as things were getting a bit sticky over what to do with Guantánamo Bay.

In a nutshell, officially Bush's anti-terror policies were Wrong but we are keeping them; officially we want to close Guantánamo but we will not give any resources to doing that. One might be forgiven for thinking this was Not Exactly In Line with Obama's original vision, but you won't find many people today in Riverdale arguing against the present set of anti-terror measures. They're all too shell-shocked by how nearly we got blown up. Except that we sort of didn't.

I mean, read the press release from the U.S. Attorney's office. It sounds like the guvmint were jolly well aware of the plot from its inception - perhaps they even whipped it up, one can't say - and could have stopped it any time they liked, but you get better arrests if you nab people with bombs in hand, so they supplied fake explosives and then foiled it dramatically on Wednesday.

This sort of theatrics is supposed to make us feel glad that foolishly restrictive measures are in place. This morning, there were police outside all the shuls round here, and people were glad. People felt safer. I felt safer. Even though I think it's idiotic for police to check people's tallit bags, I felt safer because theatrics are effective. And everyone reading about this narrowly-foiled plot is supposed to think that maybe it's not so bad the current anti-terror policies will stay in place.

Guvmint, you may be Democrats, but you don't get any cookies from me right now.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I see two entirely different apparati in place. The loopy folks who wanted to blow up synagogues were caught because of effective human intelligence, which rarely actually affects people's lives. The silly stuff like checking bags on the way into the synagogue is, as you said, security theatre. It is good for two things: catching implausibly stupid terrorists and reassuring the populace.

Did the government manufacture this whole thing? I suppose it's possible. The would-be terrorists seem to be rank amateurs, and it's hard to say how well they might have done securing an actual bomb had the FBI not been so eager to give them a fake one.

Shirei Shibolim

[debka_notion]

Wait- this is supposed to be new now? I saw it in the paper here, but I remember hearing about it while the semester was still on, same number of plotters, same 2 shuls affected, so I presumed it was the same thing, just getting reported on later through the device of a vague human interest story about the Reform rabbi and the Orthodox rabbi getting together to have coffee. Now I'm rather confused...