Disturbing Developments About London

ABC News is reporting that last week's London bombing appears to be connected to a two-year-old plot hatched in Pakistan. Authorities arrested a number of people involved in the plot last year, but apparently they didn't get everybody.

Bloggers have been filling in the rest of the story. John Aravosis at AMERICAblog puts together a lot of information about that plot and the investigation of it. Apparently, authorities had developed a mole at al Queda who was helping them gather information. The Bush Administration, probably looking to score some political points by distracting from the Democratic convention in Boston, raised terror alerts to orange, tipped off the investigation in the press, and opened the door to identifying the mole. Once the mole's name, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, appeared in the papers, there could be no more investigation, and the Brits had to scramble to mop up what they could. They feared at the time that some terrorists had slipped through their fingers, and now we know.

The Bush people have flirted back and forth with admitting responsibility for blowing the lid off the investigation, but the story has been on the back burner (if it's even still on the stove at all) for almost a year, so none of it is in the public consciousness. The details are long and somewhat complicated, but if the implications are followed through to their logical conclusions, this could be far more significant than the Karl Rove imbroglio. Radamisto has more press reports from last year. I'm sure this will continue to develop, among bloggers if not in the liberal media itself, so it will be worth keeping up with.