Josh noted the other day that the Fort Dix Six may not quite rise to the level of the take-down of the “Seeds of David” goofballs in Miami last year, “but it may not be far off the mark either.”
With this in mind, CJR’s Paul McLeary explained the other day that foiled terrorist plots are obviously very serious, but too often, these threats have turned out to be less than they appear. (via Daily Kos)
It’s hard for the press not to run with stories of possible domestic terrorism, and for good reason — it’s serious and scary business. That said, not all plots are created equal, and lumping them all together into one grab bag of thwarted domestic terrorism cases is something reporters should avoid, especially given some of the absurd plots that have been uncovered over the last couple years. This is not to say that all leads shouldn’t be investigated — they should — or that anyone discovered in any stage of planning an attack shouldn’t be scooped up — they should– but we’ve seen a couple of cases in the last few years be blown way out of proportion, and that makes us wonder what the Fort Dix story will become.
The New York Times this morning offers a good example of this grab-bag coverage when it says that the Fort Dix case is “the latest in a series of plots, targeting sites in the United States, that authorities said they have foiled. These included one last June in which seven arrests were made in Miami after the authorities described suspects talking about blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the F.B.I.’s Miami headquarters.
Except, as we later found out, the cult in Miami — billed by Dick Cheney as being “a very real threat” — turned out to be more farce than force. McLeary also noted that the “Lackawanna Six” were “hardly the criminal masterminds that they were initially made out to be.”
A few other examples come to mind. The plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge wasn’t quite what it was made out to be. Jose Padilla was not actually prepared to detonate a dirty bomb in DC. The facts of the British hijacking plot didn’t stand up well to scrutiny, and the plot to attack Los Angeles’ Library Tower turned out to be far less serious than we’d been led to believe.
Has the administration ever heard of the boy who cried wolf?
