I read Cole's piece as explaining the political dynamics of the violence, not justifying it. You don't have to sympathize with the "protesters" to try to understand what's going on. Don't be so defensive! How can we ever learn to deal intelligently with the Muslim world if we don't understand how it works?

I thought the Mohammad-bomb-in-turban cartoon was intended to point out that radical political elements in the Muslim world have hijacked their religion for their own political purposes. The violent response to the cartoon actually proved its truth. Cole is helping me to understand how this (hijacking) works in practice.

I'm not very partial to conspiricy theories but there are a few things about today's headlines that make me suspicious:

1. The announcement and arrests occurred the day after our primary elections, even though the plotters have evidently been followed for months;

2. The timing of the arrests was known in advance to Bush and Company for several days and Bush appeared on camera, on schedule, with a carefully crafted speech that told us to be afraid, very afraid, and attempted to link his surveillance activities and our counterterrorism efforts to the discovery of this plot;

3. So far as has been reported, the British police, not our counterterrorism officials were responsible for breaking up this attempt;

4. According to some news reports this type of threat has been well known to our homeland security officials since the 1990's when a similar plot was accidentally discovered in the Philippines, yet we have not deployed the technology to detect the chemicals which terrorists would use, due to budget constraints.

I'm not saying that there is no terrorist threat, only that the Bush Administration had no role in protecting us in this case, and in fact has neglected to install the necessary equipment in airports to detect these kinds of explosives. Instead, what I see is an opportunistic attempt to manufacture fear without actually doing anything to protect us, and using the situation to justify their irrational militarism and attack on our civil liberties.