More on Yesterday's Terrorist Bustin' Announcment

First off, from Keith Olbermann's Countdown show (which is one of the few things I really, really miss from cable--should an a la carte cable menu become available, I'd consider getting MSNBC just for this hour a day), some Freudian analysis of President Bush's ammounement yesterday (via this video from Crooks & Liars, which has been highlighting Olbermann all week):

Olbermann: Sigmund Freud's theory about this was formally called parapraxis--the idea that a slip of the tongue may be a mistake but it is not an accident. That if you meant to say, "what am I going to do about my life?" and instead you say, "what am I going to do about my wife?," your wife may be a bigger problem than you want to admit.

Our fifth story on the Countdown, the President of the United States revealing today for the first time ever details of a terrorist plot he claims the government disrupted. An attempt by Khalid Sheikh Muhammed to crash another jet into the, quote, "Liberty Tower in Los Angeles." But the name of the building is the Library Tower and parapraxis insists that would be more than just a slip. It could be a revelation, it could be truth trying to escape, it could be an obsession with the word liberty, or an aversion to the word library. Psychological mumbo jumbo? Maybe. Except the Mayor of Los Angeles has now come out and said nobody warned him that Mr. Bush was going to make that speech and scare the crap out of Los Angeles.
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Library? Didn't the First Lady used to work in one?

Keith later had on Gerald Posner (author of Why America Slept to comment on the motivation behind the speech (and its timing):

Olbermann: I mention how rare it is for the White House to speak in more than just vague terms about plots of any kind. Even the Mayor of LA saying he did not know all the information that was in the speech today, he certainly did not know the speech was coming. Why did this speech occur, what was accomplished by it?

Posner: What was accomplished... they're really trying to get built up, I think, for the Patriot Act, they're trying to pass more parts of the Patriot Act and at the same time, I think, they're also look at getting this scandal off of them, which is the NSA hearing scandal, something they're having trouble with.

Olbermann: Getting the name of the building wrong, obviously we can go into it psychologically, but perhaps I could as you from a counter-terror point of view, getting the name and the size of the dimensions of the building wrong in the speech about it, is that an accident? Is it irrelevant to this? What part does that play in all this?

Posner: It's a typical Bushism. It's something I'm not surprised with. This is a President who gets the details wrong sometimes, even when it comes to something as important as what the target might be in a possible terrorist attack on the West Coast of the United States. I just shake my head when I hear that happen.

So, trying to gather support for the upcoming Patriot Act vote and trying to draw some connection to the NSA wiretapping. Anything else? How about fear? This from Glenn Greenwald over at Crooks & Liars as well:

The violence inflicted by terrorists is simply a tool for ratcheting up the fear level, and the fear of the violence, rather than the violence itself, is the primary tool of the terrorist. The greater the fear of the targeted population, the closer the terrorists are to achieving their goals. When it comes to Al Qaeda's targeting of the U.S. in this manner, nobody helps the terrorists achieve those objectives more than the Bush Administration, which (like Al Qaeda) really does have as its principal goal -- particularly in an election year, and particularly when it faces all sorts of political difficulties on an array of fronts -- keeping the fear level as high as possible. The more frightened people are, they believe, the more likely they are to support the President and his party. And so fear-mongering becomes the first and really only political weapon they have. The orange alerts aren't really that effective any more. Orange is so un-scary. But tales of thwarted terrorist attacks on our cities always give rise to the same set of images and warnings which keeps the fear level nice and fresh and edgy.

Anything else? More from Time Magazine on the flip...

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NSA mixed with Al Qaeda escapees:

Later in the day, counter-terrorism czar Frances Fragos Townsend told reporters that two South Asian and two Southeast Asian countries had helped arrest all four cell leaders planning the attack, which was designed as a follow up to 9/11 and originally revealed in 2003. Townsend said all four cell leaders are still in custody, although she wouldn’t specify where.

But at the same time the Administration was chest-thumping about this victory in the war on terror, Townsend had to acknowledge that it is grappling with one of the worst examples of non-cooperation. Over the weekend, 13 convicted Al Qaeda members being held in a Yemeni jail escaped, including the reputed mastermind of the October 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole.

The timing of the foiled plot's disclosure, coming as it did as the Administration defends its controversial wiretapping program, struck many observers as more than a little curious. According to Townsend, the White House declassified the details of the 2002 plot because most of the leads in the investigation had been exhausted. A senior Administraion official brushed aside the notion that the speech was timed to this week's grilling of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales over the NSA program, noting that today's speech has been in the works since last year. "It takes forever to sign off on declassification," the official said. Townsend wouldn't confirm or deny if the NSA wiretapping, first revealed by The New York Times, has been used to foil the Los Angeles attack. But another senior Administration official told TIME: "The speech was about international cooperation and to show that actions taken have real consequences." Said the official, "You intrepid journalists can deduce whether there's a connection between the NSA program and (the West coast plot). Was there a domestic component?" The answer, given that all the alleged cell leaders were captured overseas, would seem to be no. But at a time when the Administration is defending the wiretapping program by stressing how perilous the post 9/11 world is, nothing drives home the point like a foiled attack so close to home.