How the UK Terror Plotters Hijacked a Constitution

...  the plot was real. However, it was not imminent. British officials apologized, two weeks after the fact, for the exaggerated, panic-inducing statements they had made at the time of the arrests. Naturally, the dire warnings made headlines, while the retractions and apologies went largely unnoticed. The most intriguing revelation in this article is that British officials at Scotland Yard felt in complete control of the plotters, who had not yet made flight reservations and two of whom had not yet even obtained passports. The British spies wanted to continue their surveillance of the plotters. Unfortunately, Scotland Yard was forced to act quickly because, thousands of miles away in Pakistan, the Pakistani government, without informing their British anti-terror colleagues, arrested a man with dual British/Pakistani citizenship who was, presumably, vital to the plot and whose arrest was immediately known to the plotters. From the Times: "Several senior British officials said the Pakistanis arrested Rashid Rauf without informing them first. The arrest surprised and frustrated investigators here who had wanted to monitor the suspects longer, primarily to gather more evidence and to determine whether they had identified all the people involved in the suspected plot." So if the hijackings were not imminent and the British wanted to wait before making any arrests, why did the government of Pakistan's dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, arrest Rashid Rauf when it did? So far, there has been no official explanation.

As I said, maybe I just have too fertile of an imagination, but one thing is certain: over a period of just seven weeks, that arrest triggered the British arrests that set off a fear-of-terrorism panic that gave President Bush extra ammunition to pressure Congressional Republicans, who then rushed through passage of an anti-terrorism bill that transferred new powers to the executive branch while, at the same time, immunizing President Bush and others from prosecution for their violations of the U.S. War Crimes Act.