If you didn’t think the White House was bereft of shame or even a sense of irony before, all you need to do is witness the latest salvo in its attempts to whitewash its failures. Today, in the midst of the investigations of Bush’s illegal NSA spying program (Bush supporters might prefer “extralegal” or “supralegal”) and the revelations that Libby was authorized to leak by his “White House superiors,” the President goes on television and details the thwarting of a four-year old terrorist plot against a skyscraper he can’t properly identify.

As soon as I heard the “10 terrorist plot” meme in White House communiques, I knew that they were going to save details of each undisclosed one for tough PR situations like the one they find themselves in today. But if you look closely at the speech the president gave, you’ll notice something:

Since September the 11th, the United States and our coalition partners have disrupted a number of serious al Qaeda terrorist plots — including plots to attack targets inside the United States. Let me give you an example. In the weeks after September the 11th, while Americans were still recovering from an unprecedented strike on our homeland, al Qaeda was already busy planning its next attack. We now know that in October 2001, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad — the mastermind of the September the 11th attacks — had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door, and fly the plane into the tallest building on the West Coast. We believe the intended target was Liberty [sic] Tower in Los Angeles, California.* Rather than use Arab hijackers as he had on September the 11th, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad sought out young men from Southeast Asia — whom he believed would not arouse as much suspicion. To help carry out this plan, he tapped a terrorist named Hambali, one of the leaders of an al Qaeda affiliated group in Southeast Asia called “J-I.” JI terrorists were responsible for a series of deadly attacks in Southeast Asia, and members of the group had trained with al Qaeda. Hambali recruited several key operatives who had been training in Afghanistan. Once the operatives were recruited, they met with Osama bin Laden, and then began preparations for the West Coast attack.

Their plot was derailed in early 2002 when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key al Qaeda operative. Subsequent debriefings and other intelligence operations made clear the intended target, and how al Qaeda hoped to execute it. This critical intelligence helped other allies capture the ringleaders and other known operatives who had been recruited for this plot. The West Coast plot had been thwarted. Our efforts did not end there. In the summer of 2003, our partners in Southeast Asia conducted another successful manhunt that led to the capture of the terrorist Hambali.

Whom does the President credit with stopping the plot? Surprisingly, it isn’t the U.S. incursion in Iraq, but police in unnamed Southeast Asian countries. Why, if you look at the White House’s list of the Ten Plots, you’ll see that 70% of the time, it’s the “U.S. and allies” who stop terrorists; it seems awfully disingenuous to claim credit for something other countries did. And yet, to quote the White House just four months ago:

The West Coast Airliner Plot: In mid-2002 the U.S. disrupted a plot to attack targets on the West Coast of the United States using hijacked airplanes. The plotters included at least one major operational planner involved in planning the events of 9/11.

There’s something else about the top ten list; the other two examples the U.S. claims sole credit for disrupting are the Jose Padilla and Iyman Faris plots, each of dubious viability.

Iyman Faris’ terrorist activities, for example, involved calling off a plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches after realizing it was unfeasible, and then working for the FBI as a double agent (not that this saved him any jail time). Faris had already thwarted the Bridge plan by himself before the FBI caught him, but in PR terms, the only thing that matters is that we caught us a terrist!

As for Jose Padilla, there is considerable dispute about his case, which I won’t really delve into here, but suffice it to say that the government held him for three years without charges, then charged him with none of the crimes they arrested him for in the first place.

So, by its own admission, the United States is nowhere near as effective in apprehending terrorists as “partner nations” with whom it claims multilateral cooperation. But what’s even more striking about the Ten Plots meme is that it underscores the effectiveness of what wingnuts decry as a wimpy, liberal approach–treating terrorism as a police matter.

However, when we do ‘strike at Al-Qaeda,” let’s say in Damadola, Pakistan, for example,

An AP reporter who visited Damadola about 12 hours after the attack saw three destroyed houses, hundreds of yards apart. Villagers had buried at least 15 people, including women and children, and were digging for more bodies in the rubble. Villagers denied hosting al-Zawahri or any other member of al-Qaida or Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime, and said all the dead were local people.

More than 8,000 tribesmen staged a peaceful protest in a nearby town Saturday to condemn the air strike, which one speaker described as “open terrorism.” Police dispersed a smaller protest in another town using tear gas. A mob burned the office of a US-backed aid agency near Damadola, but nobody was injured, residents said.

NBC News reported that US and Pakistani officials said Predator drones had fired as many as 10 missiles at Damadola in the Bajur tribal region. ABC quoted anonymous Pakistani military sources as saying al-Zawahri could have been among five top al-Qaida officials believed killed.

…

Doctors told AP that at least 17 people died in the attack, but residents of Damadola, a Pashtun tribal hamlet on a hillside about four miles from the Afghan border, said more than 30 died. They recounted hearing aircraft fly overhead before explosions in the village that were felt miles away.

Speaking as he dug through the rubble of his home, Zaman said he heard planes at around 2:40 a.m. and then eight huge explosions. He said planes had been flying over the village for three or four days.

At another destroyed house, Sami Ullah, a 17-year-old student, said 24 of his family members were killed and vowed he would “seek justice from God.”

No, we’d rather recycle news of a four year old plot than focus on how our military strikes have created terrorists and terrorist sympathizers faster than the U.S. army can kill them. The logic of terrorism fails for both sides; the terrorists think they can get Western countries to bow before them in supplication because they kill a few thousand people out of millions; we think that we can kill enough Islamists to get the Arab world to submit to Western civilization. As the example of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows, targeted assassinations, house demolitions and suicide bombings are peripheral to the actual issues at hand for the two camps–violence just begets more violence. But if you want to actually stop terrorists in an operational sense, you have to turn to the international police community. Killing brown people may be emotionally satisfying for a segment of the American public, but it only makes things worse.