Loose Lips

The men charged on June 1 with plotting to blow up New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport hoped to outdo the attacks of 9/11, according to the complaint filed against them. “Anytime you hit [a] Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States,” one suspect allegedly told an informant. But the men were amateurs, and the worst their plans might have achieved was not an apocalypse but a fire in a remote part of the airport. Thankfully, authorities foiled the plot before it could get smarter.

Yet when U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf announced the bust, she deployed code-red verbiage: “Had the plot been carried out, it could have resulted in unfathomable damage, deaths and destruction.” It was “chilling.” The devastation could have been “unthinkable.”

This is how prosecutors talk, in fluent hyperbole. In their mind, the trial has already begun, and a press conference is an early chance to sway potential jurors and raise their own profile. But it’s also how candidates for President talk: 9/11 Mayor Rudy Giuliani cited the J.F.K. plot as evidence that Democrats can’t be trusted to keep us safe. “The Democrats want to put us in reverse to the 1990s,” charged Giuliani (a former prosecutor, not coincidentally). “It’s not a bumper sticker. It is a real war.”

From there, the exaggerations seep into popular discourse. Reporters reinforce the rhetoric. In a question to candidates at a Democratic debate on June 3, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer cited the recent arrests: “This alleged plot at J.F.K….could have done, supposedly, horrendous damage and caused an incredible number of casualties.”

The problem with bombast is that it comes at a cost. The struggle against violent Islamic extremism is not a show trial. It’s a long fight that requires discipline. We must balance fear with reason and weigh probability, not just possibility.

Americans have learned to sense when terrorism is being exploited for personal gain. And each time it happens, the public loses a little bit of faith. We might even begin to think that the threat is not very serious after all. That too would be a mistake. That kind of distrust and complacency would indeed be something to fear.