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It'll be forgotten very soon, Jon Stewarts AWSOME RALLY (which won't get half the people Becks did) is tomorow!! CNN and MSNBC will cover it from start to finsh, few people will watch but DAMIT they'll be there!

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from what few details are known about the "foiled plots," it seem that Bush is once again misleading the nation. In only two of the cases are any details known---and the evidence in both cases is mighty thin:

In first case, involving Jose Padilla, it's important to note that Padilla has not yet even been charged with a crime.

As Britain's The Telegraph newspaper pointed out, Paul Wolfowitz "stressed that 'there was not an actual plan' to set off a radioactive device in America and Padilla had not begun trying to acquire materials. Intelligence officials said his research had not gone beyond surfing the internet."

The second case, involving Ohio truck driver Iyman Faris, is unlikely to be dramatized in a Tom Clancy-style thriller appearing at your local cinema any time soon. As Think Progress pointed out:

"(Iyman Faris) ... pleaded guilty in June 2003 to two felony charges of supporting a foreign terrorist organization. He was charged with plotting to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, but U.S. officials admitted that Faris had abandoned the plot because he deemed it unlikely to succeed. "After scouting the bridge and deciding its security and structure meant the plot was unlikely to succeed, he passed along a message to al Qaeda in early 2003 that said ‘the weather is too hot.’" [CNN, 6/19/03]"

Of course, outside of the meager details known about the aforementioned two cases, next to nothing is known about the other eight alleged foiled terror plots.

Here's what doesn't make any sense to me. If the U.S. did indeed foil terror plots during that time frame, don't you think we might have heard about it during the bitterly-fought, take-no-prisoners 2004 election campaign?

After all, Bush was desperately trying to convince the American people that his war on terror was a big success and that he could protect America better than John Kerry could. It seems to me that the Bush team would have been shouting from the highest rooftops that the U.S. had already foiled numerous Al-Qaeda attacks.

I've heard Republicans argue that Bush was unable to mention the foiled attacks previously, out of concerns for national security.

Of course, this makes no sense either.

I could see the need to maintain secrecy before a terror attack is foiled. But there is no reason to keep news of a foiled attack secret AFTER the fact.

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