Jihad with Extra Cheese

Out of a sense of humility and noblesse oblige, I held off from commenting on the alleged jihad plot to blow up JFK Airport and a substantial portion of Queens because, even though it sounded even more ridiculous than the pizza plot against Fort Dix, I am not omniscient. Even though the arrests and terror plot announcements to date sound like the work of a joint operation between the Marx Brothers and the Keystone Kops, overseen by Claude “Round Up the Usual Suspects” Rains in Casablanca, there’s always a distant possibility that somebody might be acting in good faith.

Gawd, am I a naive soul:

When U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf described the alleged terror plot to blow up Kennedy Airport as “one of the most chilling plots imaginable,” which might have caused “unthinkable” devastation, one law enforcement official said he cringed.

The plot, he knew, was never operational. The public had never been at risk. And the notion of blowing up the airport, let alone the borough of Queens, by exploding a fuel tank was in all likelihood a technical impossibility.

And now, with a portrait emerging of alleged mastermind Russell Defreitas as hapless and episodically homeless, and of co-conspirator Abdel Nur as a drug addict, Mauskopf’s initial characterizations seem more questionable — some go so far as to say hyped.

“I think her comments were over the top,” said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. “It was a totally overstated characterization that doesn’t comport with the facts.”

Greenberger said he has no argument with police pursuing and stopping the alleged plotters.

“I think they were correct to take this seriously,” he said. “… But there’s a pattern here of Justice Department attorneys overstating what they have. I think they feel under tremendous pressure to vindicate the elaborate counterterrorism structure they’ve created since 9/11, including the Patriot Act.”

Mauskopf declined to comment Tuesday, but Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) dismissed criticism of law enforcement as “the price of success when you haven’t been attacked in six years. We’ve gone from criticizing them for not doing enough immediately after 9/11 to now criticizing them too much.”

Ernest Hemingway wrote that in Africa, “everything is true at first light and a lie by noon.” Scare stories from the War On Terror appear to have an even shorter shelf life.

Or, to paraphrase Sidney Falco at the end of Sweet Smell of Success, these Bushies have such contempt for people, it makes them stupid.