Bush shoots for ‘Jaws,’ delivers ‘Jaws 2’

He used as a parallel those pathetic arrests outside Miami last year in which a few men wound up getting charged as terrorists because they couldn’t tell the difference between an al-Qaida operative and an FBI informant.

Their “ringleader” seemed to be much more interested in getting his “terrorist masters” to buy him a new car than in actually terrorizing anybody.

That’s three for you, Mr. Bush.

“And just last August,” you concluded, “British authorities uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over the Atlantic Ocean.”

In a series of dramatic raids, 24 men were arrested.

Turned out, sir, a few of them actually had gone on the Internets to check out some flight schedules.  

Turned out, sir, only a few of them actually had the passports needed to even get on the planes.

The plot to which President Bush referred was a plot without bombs.

It was a plot without any indication that the essence of the operation — the in-flight mixing of volatile chemicals carried on board in sports drink bottles — was even doable by amateurs or professional chemists.

It was a plot even without sufficient probable cause.

A third of the 24 arrested that day — exactly 90 days before the American midterm elections — have since been released.

The British had been watching those men for a year.

Before the week was out, their first statement, that the plot was “ready to go, in days,” had been rendered inoperative.

British officials told NBC News of the lack of passports and plans; told us that they had wanted to keep the suspects under surveillance for at least another week.

Even an American official confirmed to NBC’s investigative unit that there was “disagreement over the timing.”

The British then went further. Sources inside their government told the English newspaper the Guardian that the raids had occurred only because the Pakistanis had arrested a man named Rasheed Raouf.

That Raouf had been arrested by Pakistan only because we had threatened to do it for them.

That the British had acted only because our government was willing — to quote that newspaper, The Guardian — to “ride roughshod” over the plans of British intelligence.

Oh, by the way, Mr. Bush, an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan reduced the charges against Mr. Raouf to possession of bomb-making materials and being there without proper documents.

Still, sir — evidently, that’s close enough.

Score four for you!

Your totally black-and-white conclusions in the State of the Union were based on one gray area, and on three palettes on which the experts can’t even see smudge, let alone gray.

It would all be laughable, Mr. Bush, were you not the president of the United States.

It would all be political hyperbole, Mr. Bush, if you had not, on this kind of “intelligence,” taken us to war, now sought to escalate that war, and are threatening new war in Iran and maybe even elsewhere.

What you gave us a week ago tonight, sir, was not intelligence, but rather a walk-through of how speculation and innuendo, guesswork and paranoia, daydreaming and fear-mongering, combine in your mind and the minds of your government, into proof of your derring-do and your success against the terrorists.

The ones who didn’t have anthrax.

The ones who didn’t have plane tickets or passports.

The ones who didn’t have any clue, let alone any plots.

But they go now into our history books as the four terror schemes you’ve interrupted since 9/11.

They go into the collective consciousness as firm evidence of your diligence, of the necessity of your ham-handed treatment of our liberties, of the unavoidability of the 3,075 Americans dead in Iraq.

Congratulations, sir.

You are the hero of “Jaws 2.”

You have kept the Piper Cub out of the hands of Spartacus.

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