The Daily Background

I know I haven’t written about the terror busts in London yet, and as some readers may have noticed, I will often times ignore stories that are really big simply because they already dominate the news. Anyways, I thought I’d say a few things about it.

Naturally the story is getting a lot of play on right-wing blogs, which generally suggest that this is another victory in the “war on terror” and that it vindicates Bush that if left to Democrats to prosecute this worldwide “war on terror,” the London car-bombs would have exploded killing hundreds.

Here’s the thing. Nothing I’ve read indicates that anything out of the ordinary was used to nip this plot in the bud. In fact, British police seem to have discovered both car-bombs using no special incursions on civil liberties. One was found after ambulance drivers noticed a car parked outside a nightclub they had been called to, and the other was illegally parked and thus towed.

Scores of lives were probably saved, yes. But none of Bush’s illegal wiretaps were needed. The Scotland Yard didn’t have to export anyone to Macedonia to get tortured. They didn’t snoop in anybody’s library records. Or infiltrate any peace groups with FBI agents. Or label anyone an “enemy combatant” and suspend their right to haebeas corpus.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog