All's Well that's Not Investigated

All's Well that's Not Investigated Yet - I caught a few minutes of Hewitt last night, while station-surfing (and in the rare moments I could get the car radio away from "Radio Disney").

Hewitt was interviewing Joshua Micah Marshall, one of the tonier bloggers from the left.

Marshall said something that echoed what he'd written in an MSNBC piece, and on his blog, earlier in the day:

All the horrors of terrorism aside, that line really brought a smile to my face. There was no plot. So there really wasn't much of a way al Qaeda could have been involved, right?"

"WRONG", I yelled, to my kids' alarm. "We just don't know yet!".

I nearly pulled over to a pay phone - but I had to get somewhere fast, and I vowed to blog about it today.

Fortunately, Lileks beat me to the punch in the Bleat today:

When I read this, I summoned my inner Moe the Bartender: whaaaa? How the devil can you assume that, right off the bar? First of all: the arms dealer thought he was buying real missiles. And what would he do with the merch?

1. Give them to the United Way for their upcoming “Pledge Or Else” drive

2. Mount them on the wall, and impress his friends by reprising the “say hello to my leel fren” climax of “Scarface”

3. Sell them to someone who wanted to, oh, I don’t know, bring down a jet

I mean, the fact that it’s “not immediately clear” that there was a connection to al-Qaeda or any other collection of hot-eyed nutballs hardly means there was no connection; it means that the reporter asked his source if al-Qaeda et al was connected, and the source said “no idea.”

Exactly.

This is the mirror image of the Administration behavior that makes the left howl with glee, and makes some of us on the right cringe; publicizing claims before anyone is really, really sure. We have no idea yet who was behind the deal, and according to Instapundit this morning, we may never know, thanks to the BBC (link via Instapundit)

But those plans went awry late Tuesday afternoon when the Feds learned that the BBC was about to broadcast a sensational report on Lakhani’s arrest by one of its star correspondents, Tom Mangold. The BBC story, based on an apparent leak from a law-enforcement source, had some key details wrong. For one thing, it falsely claimed that the arms dealer’s attempted sale of a shoulder-fired SA-18 missile and launder was part of a plot by terrorists to shoot down Air Force One—a target that never actually came up in the discussions.
But even so, U.S. law-enforcement sources tell NEWSWEEK, the damage was done. The FBI had to abort its plan to recruit Lakhani as an informant and instead charged him today in federal court in Newark, N.J., with weapons smuggling and with providing material support to terrorists. Also arrested in the case were two alleged confederates—a New York City jeweler and a Malaysian businessman—who were charged with conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transfer business.

So not only may we never find out who was really behind the sale - Al Quaeda or merely run of the mill terrorists who want to shoot down planes, presumably - but our best chance to really know was blown for a scoop.

UPDATE: Scrappleface has the better story.

Posted by Mitch at August 14, 2003 08:08 AM