The Irresponsibility Society

Ding-dong! Speak, Memory! Remember last summer, coincidentally with the Democratic Convention, when the Homeland Security alert level was kicked up, just after the Pakistanis, "recovered the laptop of a captured Al Qaeda leader, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, on July 13, 2004."? It seems that Khan, after his arrest, was continuing to supply information about his network to British Intelligence, and that by making a great to-do about the incident, the US Administration blew his brand-new cover. Americablog has the full rundown (and thanks to Crooks & Liars for the link).

Furthermore, it now appears that remnants of Khan's network - the guys the Brits couldn't catch in the resulting high-speed diaspora out of Luton - were the people behind last week's London bombings.

My god, blowing an asset like Khan, when we already have such difficulty penetrating terrorist groups, seemed like incompetence at the time; now it seems nearly criminal, given the long-term consequences. Chalk up a few more casualties to the Bushies' determination to pay any price for the rule of the Republican Party, for what other reason was there for this botch than to distract and detract from their political opposition? Every time this government starts yelling about National Security, I feel less safe - they're playing us. It's Plamegate, it's the Downing Street Memos - all of a piece. And they are actively endangering us in the process of maintaining their grip on power. They really do take us for fools, for sheep, and we have (collectively, at any rate) given them cause to persist in that belief. Hey, let's withhold for a while, like the heroines of Lysistrata, and see what happens!