Shifting Priorities in War on Terror

Prevention of terrorist plots.

What a notion.

No one can know for sure whether an al-Qaida loyalist had what it took to follow through on a suspected plot to bomb Hudson River train tunnels. He had no explosives and no detailed plan, and isn't believed to have visited New York, authorities said. But U.S. officials said they weren't willing to find out.

''We don't wait until someone has lit the fuse (to) step in and prevent something from happening. That would be playing games with peoples' lives,'' Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday as Assem Hammoud's arrest in Lebanon was being announced.

Policy makers and security experts said the bust illustrates a shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy that has played out in other recent high-profile cases, including the arrest of seven men suspected of wanting to bomb Chicago's Sears Tower.

Law enforcers, they said, are now willing to act swiftly against al-Qaida sympathizers, even if it means grabbing wannabe terrorists whose plots may be only pipe dreams.

''Before 9/11, the FBI was thinking in terms of criminal convictions,'' said Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

How do we do such a thing? Through surveillance of transnational communications. Through examination of certain kinds of financial transactions. Through the infiltration of jihadi chat rooms and watching communities where jihadis have operated in the past.

However, the NYT has specifically revealed significant portions of two of the three aforementioned programs to the point of rendering them useless. They revealed details of the NSA program to intercept communications between individuals outside the USA and those here in the US. They revealed the SWIFT program, despite the Administration pleading for Keller and the Times to not publish the story.

The usual suspects on the Left, liberal think tanks and the like (not to mention bloggers) think that the arrests, like those of the Miami Seven or the NY Terror plot suspects are only made known to highlight a threat and the actual criminal acts are deemed far less serious. Well, the alternative is for these individuals to continue to run amok and make good on their threats. The charges and convictions may appear to be less serious than the claims, but that has to do with the way that the justice system operates in convicting individuals based on what can be proven beyond a doubt. All the same, we know that the convictions are piling up:

Some of the suspected plots taken to trial in the past few years have appeared to be unsophisticated, but that hasn't hurt prosecutors in court.

In May, a Brooklyn man, Shahawar Matin Siraj, was convicted of plotting to plant a bomb in a Manhattan subway station, despite defense claims that he was a patsy coaxed into discussing a bombing by a government informant.

In April, a federal jury convicted a young farm worker in Lodi, Calif., of supporting terrorists by visiting an al-Qaida training camp during a trip to Pakistan. Prosecutors claimed Hamid Hayat was interested in attacking hospitals, banks and grocery stores, but they presented no evidence of actual planning of such assaults at trial.

In November, a young, outwardly pro-American Pakistani man was convicted in New York of trying to help an al-Qaida operative sneak into the United States, despite his claims that he wasn't aware that the acquaintance of his father's was a terrorist.

Nearly all of the defendants in these cases claim to have been entrapped or otherwise duped into making conspiratorial claims. We're already seeing just that in the Miami case, where the defense team is making precisely those claims.