I had suspected that the UK Bomb Plot that was thwarted in August (thanks to the NSA and CIA and the Treasury’s SWIFT program no doubt) was probably going to be timed to do the most damage by exploding over US cities. It seems I was correct:

A group of alleged terrorists arrested in London in August planned to blow up airliners over U.S. cities to maximize casualties, rather than over the Atlantic Ocean as many intelligence officials originally thought, according to recent remarks by a senior FBI official.

The comments by Mark Mershon, head of the FBI’s New York field office, indicate that U.S. and British intelligence officials now think that the airliner plot was aimed at maximizing the potential loss of life and economic impact.

“The plan was to bring them down over U.S. cities, not over the ocean,” Mershon said Oct. 24 at the Infosecurity 2006 conference in New York, according to Government Security News, which first reported the remarks in a newsletter this week.

Recall that the liberals claimed stopping this AQ attack was a sign Bush was making the US less safe! The mind reels at the logic of that kind of thinking. Here are all my posts on the matter to date.