From Dearborn to London

Michelle Malkin has excellent roundups on the latest apprehensions of apparent terror plot suspects in Dearborn (with $1,100 in cash, flight manifests, information on airport security checkpoints and 12 tracphones) and London (planning “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”).

JOHN adds: The London Times has a good roundup of what is known so far. The plot seems to resemble the 1995 al Qaeda plan to blow up approximately ten airliners simultaneously, over the Pacific Ocean. That plot was narrowly averted when one of the terrorists was captured in the Philippines. If it had succeeded, the era in which terrorism dominates the news would have begun six years sooner.

UPDATE: Reader Matt Dole of Lincoln Logs writes:

If my little appalachian town is going to be put on the map for actually reporting suspicious activity and tracking the suspects down, I want the proper authorities to get credit.

The terror suspects from Dearborn were actually captured in Marietta, Ohio where they were apparently heading south on a swing to South Carolina stopping a wal-marts and other stores to buy these track
phones.

They were captured after some employees of a radio shack called the local sheriff’s office (a former FBI guy who knows his stuff) to report suspicious activity. They were later pulled over and the documents (including flight manifests and instructions on hacking into airline databases) were found with the phones.

And the eagle-eyed William Katz writes:

I happened to be up in the middle of the night – common for a writer – and caught the first bulletins on the UK terror plot. We’re now about six hours into the coverage, and the MSM is going through major self-abuse to avoid the “M” word. But here it is, finally, in one of the most tortured quotes I’ve seen about terrorism. This is from the London Times website: Meanwhile police chiefs and John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, have spoken to community leaders to keep them in touch with the investigation.

Mindful of the outrage amongst the Muslim community when Met anti-terror officers raided a house in Forest Gate last month, Mr Stephenson was careful to stress that Muslims were not being targeted by the police.

“This is not about communities: it is about criminals, murderers, people who want to commit mass murder. This is about people who might masquerade in the community, hiding behind certain faiths, but who want to commit acts that no right-minder person would want to applaud,” he said.

Meanwhile, back at the BBC – just blasted by the Israeli government for its blatantly biased war coverage – they haven’t quite gotten to “M.” This is as far as they go on their website:

According to BBC sources the “principal characters” suspected of being involved in the plot were British-born. There are also understood to be links to Pakistan.

The New York Times actually gets it reasonably right. They point in the proper direction, although maintaining the politically correct level of obliqueness:

In London, the police did not identify the suspects or their origin, though Paul Stephenson, the deputy metropolitan police commissioner, said “community leaders” had been alerted about the police action, using a code word for the British Muslim community.

Code word? In terror probes? Whoever heard of such a thing?

The MSM has widely reported that the investigation has been ongoing for months, so be on guard against any attempt to link the plot to the Lebanon war.

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