Feeding Paranoia III

So now the US government is adopting a "softer tone" and cooling down the "run for your lives!" rhetoric it adopted just yesterday about a possible Al Quaeda attack on NYC or Washington. And the info that was collected, the surveillance that was done was in fact three or four years old. Yes, the info about this surveillance was found only a month ago, but why the sudden raising of alert levels as if an attack was imminent? It just ain't so. Per the NYT:

"The information, which officials said was indicative of preparations for a possible truck- or car-bomb attack, left significant gaps. It did not clearly describe the suspected plot, indicate when an attack was to take place nor did it describe the identities of people involved."

In other words, it confirmed what we should have already assumed: that Al Quaeda has cased any number of buildings around the country and would love to bomb them. Don't say the gov't knows stuff we don't know, because the reason the gov't is tamping down the rhetoric today is because it was overheated, just like John Ashcroft went overboard on that dirty bomb scare and had to be chastised by the President and just like Tom Ridge went overboard the LAST time he warned of an imminent attack and the FBI publicly distanced themselves from him and said they had no idea what he was talking about. Ridge using the new terror alert announcement to repeatedly praise Bush's leadership certainly didn't help either.

Eventually, they'll be right, of course, because eventually there will be another terrorist attack inside the United States. The sad truth is that we KNOW New York and DC are now and forever will be targets for terrorists. That will never change. So every new tidbit of information can't be an excuse or a knee-jerk "we better say something or they'll blame us for not saying it" reason for raising the terror alert. If it continues, we'll get so blase that when there is real and credible information and they do raise the terror alert in the future, average citizens and local law enforcement may be so innured to it by then they won't increase their vigilance to the utmost degree.