Terroism Hysteria watch: the London plot

Sullivan and I are both skeptical that the London Terror plot merrits the kind of reaction it's been getting. Not much new in his post here, but the point is worth re-iterating: The alleged reason we can't have liquids on planes is because of the discovery of the London plot, which turned out to be not nearly as far along as initial reports indicated. Here's the New York Times from Aug 27th:

But British officials said the suspects still had a lot of work to do. Two of the suspects did not have passports, but had applied for expedited approval. One official said the people suspected of leading the plot were still recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers.

While investigators found evidence on a computer memory stick indicating that one of the men had looked up airline schedules for flights from London to cities in the United States, the suspects had neither made reservations nor purchased plane tickets, a British official said. Some of their suspected bomb-making equipment was found five days after the arrests in a suitcase buried under leaves in the woods near High Wycombe, a town 30 miles northwest of London.

Another British official stressed that martyrdom videos were often made well in advance of an attack. In fact, two and a half weeks since the inquiry became public, British investigators have still not determined whether there was a target date for the attacks or how many planes were to be involved. They say the estimate of 10 planes was speculative and exaggerated.

Once again, I must advocate that our reactions to terror threats be: 1. Proportional to the actual threat, as best as we can ascertain it, and not based on fear, hysteria, and paranoia; and 2. Effective against the actual threats we face, and not based on a desire to "just do something".

We've been failing on both counts in numerous ways recently: wildly disproportionate responses (invading Iraq) that don't even accomplish what they set out to do (make us safer from Al Qaeda-style terrorism). Not only are we swatting flies with sledgehammers, we're missing.