[Jeffery]

its the old damn if you do damn if you dont

Lets use the English transatlantic terrorist plot for example. Here you have a group of terrorists who were being monitored extensively, lacked plane tickets, and they lacked passports, not only that the plan they were claimed they were going to do, mix TATP in the bathroom, the entire plane would know something is up and if an angry passenger hadn't broken down the door simply because the guy inside was taking too long then they would certainly do so after the fumes started coming out.

We've given extraordinary credit to a collection of jihadist wannabes with an exceptionally poor grasp of the mechanics of attacking a plane, whose only hope of success would have been a pure accident. They would have had to succeed in spite of their own ignorance and incompetence, and in spite of being under police surveillance for a year. Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible? | The Register

So please, explain, how would they have been damned if they didn't? So doesn't it strike us all as a bit odd that the timing of the arrest, came directly after Bush's friend losing the primary? It seems to me that this was a card that the administration realized they had, and could keep for sometime and whenever they wanted to, play it for political gain.