So What About the Subway Attack that Wasn't?

Click here, here, and here for some background.

As I understand it, U.S. forces captured some bombmakers in Iraq, and the informant who led us to them also tipped the U.S. off that a bombing attack was going to occur on the New York City subway system of Sunday.

The attacks did not occur.

So I see four possibilities:

(1) First, our actions prevented the attack

(2) The attacks were planned, but the people in the U.S. who were to carry them out couldn't get their act together.

(3) The informant is not an ally but an enemy, and was feeding us disinformation to scare us. The bombmakers were either falsely so labelled or were given up "sacrificially" in order to give the informant credibility (or may have been terrorists, but the informant was from a rival group rather than opposed to terrorism per se.

(4) The story was fabricated by U.S. officials to scare the populace, either to get more support for the war in Iraq, or to exercise more power over our lives.

I don't see any reason that #4 is likely; even if Bloomberg's increased security turns out to have been unnecessary (if, say, there were no people in the U.S. planning to attack, it sounds to me as if he made the best possible decision given what he knew at the time) and I don't think that the feds would try to drum up support for the War in Iraq by embellishing the current terrorist threat from there, because it would quite likely backfire; that is, people would question why, 2 1/2 years after the invasion, Iraq is a threat to us; it would make our policy in Iraq seem to be less than a success.

Of the three remaining options,I'm not certain that there is yet enough evidence to come to any conclusions. However, in what appears to be the absence of arrests in the U.S. over the information, and due to the fact that the informant failed some sections of a polygraph, I would strongly lead to there being some subterfuge by our informant.

Remember, the most deadly single incident in Iraq was caused not by a bomb but by people's own fears, which caused them to panic and kill each other in a stampede. Whether the deadly "Shiite stampede" was an accident or deliberately provoked by terrorists, this could not have failed to draw the attention of those who wish the U.S. harm.

So was the informant launching a terrorist attack that consisted of terror itself? Perhaps.

We shall see.

That is all.