A Great Fizzling Sound

Remember the half-dozen men arrested in North Baltimore this September on suspicion of plotting another 9/11? The government's case against them has fizzled, Scott Shane reports in the Baltimore Sun, with early reports of frightening evidence turning out to be false. One example: "Rather than surveillance photographs of terrorist targets, the pictures in the apartment turned out to be tourist snapshots or postcards."

Shane's article is about not just the Baltimore case, but the larger phenomenon of why police forces more used to investigating crimes after the fact have come to err on the side of caution. In an interesting aside, the piece explains how so many Afghan-Americans got into the fried chicken business.