On Terror Case, Rare Silence From Obama

The absence of a statement from the Obama administration on the arrest of terror suspect Najibullah Zazi is quite a contrast from a president Americans have gotten used to seeing just about every time they turn on the TV—and from the treatment such incidents received during the Bush administration, when, Marc Ambinder points out, threats were often greatly exaggerated.

Bush officials “regularly inflated the significance of incidents that, in retrospect, turned out not to be as dangerous,” Ambinder blogs for the Atlantic. “Plots, real and imagined, were conflated into a diffuse and ongoing, severe and acute terrorist threat that required constant vigilance from Americans.” An Obama insider says the silence is “deliberate,” a decision to “leave enforcement matters to law enforcement, and to not let politics seep into at all.”
(More Najibullah Zazi stories.)