Left I on the News

Four men were arrested in New York in the latest "terror plot," with a curiously bifurcated nature - "detonate a car with plastic explosives outside a temple," and "shoot military planes...with Stinger surface-to-air guided missiles." I'll let the "facts settle" before I comment on the plot itself, but I do want to make note of the charge: "conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States and conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles." So apparently, according to the U.S. legal system, a car bomb is a "weapon of mass destruction." Bush and Cheney and FOX News were right all along - there were "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. And, sadly, still are.

Note how the use of anti-aircraft missiles is a separate charge. Those, you see, are "conventional" weapons, weapons used by the U.S. government (and others, of course). As such they're "legitimate" weapons. Car bombs? Like suicide bombing and other "weapons of the poor," those are "illegitimate" according to the U.S. "Weapons of mass destruction" even, laughably. Meanwhile "conventional" weapons in use by the U.S. continue to cause more "mass destruction" than all such "weapons of mass destruction" ever have, with of course two notable exceptions - Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Update: Some of those facts have settled, and it appears clearer and clearer that, as was to be expected, this is yet another case of FBI entrapment.