The day after Dick Cheney waxed poetic about torture and peddled his tired, old lies about 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, it should be pointed out that a terrorist plot was foiled in New York by ... wait for it ... a law enforcement investigation. Emphasis on law.
And while this may turn out to be another gang-that-couldn't-shoot-straight, along the lines of the hapless Liberty Six, the bottom line is, the suspects thought they were planting 30 pounds of C-4 outside of a synagogue and a Jewish community center, and they were caught through a good, old-fashioned law enforcement investigation ... and there wasn't a waterboard in sight.
And the really crazy part (from the criminal complaint)?
..in subsequent paragraphs, I have set forth excerpts of certain communications recorded during this investigation with the consent of the CW, as well as excerpts of telephone communications that were intercepted pursuant to court authorization.
Did you catch that? "Pursuant to court authorization." What a concept.
Of course this does raise a troubling issue; since Republicans (and Harry Reid) insist that U.S. courts and prisons aren't capable of handling potential terrorists, what are we to do with these suspects? Or as Hilzoy asks:
This raises the difficult question: what should we do with these would-be terrorists while they await trial? And if they are convicted, what then? I assume that if it's too dangerous to move people at Guantanamo to the United States, it must be much too dangerous to allow these jihadists to run loose in our prisons. After all, they might provide financing for other jihadists from their supermax cells, or radicalize other prisoners, or use special Terrorist Mind Control Techniques to create a whole army of brainwashed convicts under their complete control.
I'd suggest killing them, cutting them into pieces, and shipping their parts to parts unknown immediately (trials? who can afford trials under these circumstances?), if I weren't afraid that some hitherto unknown al Qaeda trick might allow their reanimated body parts to slither around in search of one another and, eventually, reconstitute themselves as the Islamofascist Undead. Earlier, I thought we should send prisoners into space, but that was before I realized that that would allow them to join forces with the Klingons.
And while Hilzoy may be overstating the danger from Klingons, her concerns are otherwise spot-on.