About that Queens terror plot

Josh Marshall has been good on this, and arguing that this may be the real thing -- unlike every case we heard about, hyped by various Bush Administration agencies in the past years. As Marshall recalls the history:

In most of the earlier terror cases over the last decade, the suspects were either total chumps who were lured into stings by aggressive government informants or they were genuine bad guys who really wanted to blow something up but, in most cases, lacked the know-how and connections. And it was in the process of casting about for someone who would help them learn to blow things up that they came up on the governments radar and were led into a phony 'plot' that got them arrested.

It's always been paradoxically reassuring that these goofs, like the Liberty Six down in Miami or a few other plots in the New York area were apparently the best al Qaeda could do. And in those cases, the government was tracking these guys very, very closely -- in fact, the government was in many respects running the plot. So they knew exactly when to blow the whistle because they knew everything that was happening.

He goes on to explain how this case seems so very different.