Premature?

"Hm," indeed.

I wonder what the rush was?

If the British, when they finish searching the properties of the suspects, find little or nothing to convict them on it should get interesting.

Politics aside, interesting article in today's Times looking at the different methods of the British and U.S. investigative agencies.

Although details of the British investigation remain secret, Bush administration officials say Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, was for at least several months aware of a plot to set off explosions on airliners flying to the United States from Britain, as well as the identity of the people who would carry it out.

British officials suggested that the arrests were held off to gather as much information as possible about the plot and the reach of the network behind it. Although it is not clear how close the plotters were to acting, or how capable they were of carrying out the attacks, intelligence and law enforcement officials have described the planning as well advanced.

The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have suggested in the past that they would never allow a terrorist plot discovered here to advance to its final stages, for fear that it could not be stopped in time.

In June, the F.B.I. arrested seven people in Florida on charges of plotting attacks on American landmarks, including the Sears Tower in Chicago, with investigators openly acknowledging that the suspects, described as Al Qaeda sympathizers, had only the most preliminary discussions about an attack.

“Our philosophy is that we try to identify plots in the earliest stages possible because we don’t know what we don’t know about a terrorism plot,” Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said at the time. “Once we have sufficient information to move forward with a prosecution, that’s what we do.”

The differences in counterterrorism strategy reflect an important distinction between the legal systems of the United States and Britain and their definitions of civil liberties, with MI5 and British police agencies given far greater authority in general than their American counterparts to conduct domestic surveillance and detain terrorism suspects.

Britain’s newly revised terrorism laws permit the detention of suspects for 28 days without charge. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government had been pressing for 90 days, but Parliament blocked the proposal. In the United States, suspects must be brought before a judge as soon as possible, which courts have interpreted to mean within 48 hours. Law enforcement officials have detained some terrorism suspects designated material witnesses for far longer. (The United States has also taken into custody overseas several hundred people suspected of terrorist activity and detained them at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as enemy combatants.)

The trouble with the American approach is we end up "breaking up consipiracies" that consist of nothing more than a few nutcases looking to score their "al Qaeda uniforms." That trivializes the law enforcement challenge and the "wolf!" crying inures the public to real threats. And if a real threat is found it alerts any networks that may exist that they've been infiltrated.

Trouble with the British approach, of course, is sometimes bombs go off in the tubes.

All that said, I am confident that U.S. law enforcement approaches the challenge with a great deal more sophistication than the Rumsfeld/Franks approach to the war in Iraq. I don't think the FBI is directing their operations based on slides entitled "pressure to achieve end-state over time." Sheesh. Via Drum.