List of Foiled Plots

The Administration, appealing to the calls of security-minded Americans along the lines of "exactly what have you accomplished in the GWOT?" has released a list of 10 successful plot-thwartings. These are the successes- all that work with the intelligence community, booking shoe-bombers, American Taliban, Paris-NYC flight cancellations, all those second-in-command Al Qaeda operatives we've arrested, NYC subway warnings, our highly effective color-coded terror warning system. It all has to add up to something, right?

A White House list of 10 terrorist plots disrupted by the United States has confused counterterrorism experts and officials, who say they cannot distinguish between the importance of some incidents on the list and others that were left off.

Intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the White House overstated the gravity of the plots by saying that they had been foiled, when most were far from ready to be executed. Others noted that the nation's color-coded threat index was not raised from yellow, or "elevated" risk of attack, to orange, or "high" risk, for most of the time covered by the incidents on the list.

The president made it "sound like well-hatched plans," said a former CIA official involved in counterterrorism during that period. "I don't think they fall into that category."

...
Counterterrorism experts said they could not explain why some of the U.S. government's bigger successes did not make the list, including the thwarted attack by Richard Reid, who tried to set off explosives in his shoes aboard a transatlantic flight in December 2001, and the capture a year later of Ali Saleh Kahlah Marri, a graduate student at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., who officials believe had ties to Sept. 11 terrorists.

"We don't know how they came to the conclusions they came to," said one counterterrorism official, who spoke anonymously for fear of angering the White House. "It's safe to say that most of the [intelligence] community doesn't think it's worth very much."

Ahhh yes, that's nice. A nice compendum of concensus-minded successes.

So here's what we can take from this article:

1. The value, liklihood, and success of these incidences seems to be irrelevent. Other incidences not added to the list could have been more important, ones on the list may have been completely useless. The problem is that The Administration put out a list without any criteria, arming Americans and intelligence agencies with no tools of preparation or guidance. This is a purely political list, drafted as a PR excercise.
2. Many of these incidences occured at times when our threat-index color codes were not raised. This again supports the theory that the color coded system is a tool of political opportunism and fear-mongering, and regularly has little to do with valid concerns of national safety.
3. Intelligence sources who are critical of this list, or of anything, refuse to offer up their credentials and identity for FEAR OF ANGERING THE ADMINISTRATION. This is horrifying in itself, and hearkens back to the political fear endured by the McCarthyist witch hunts.

Good work on compiling that list, there, The Administration. Looks like just yet another success to add to your long, long list of ambivalent, self-negated successes you take credit for.