Nothing Explodes For The Time Being

Thoughts upon hearing about today's wave of arrests: Did they just roust a bunch of people at random? Shortly followed by: Wow, I'm glad nothing in the city exploded. Followed by: well, even if they did arrest a bunch of random people, at least no tourists were inexplicably shot on trains.

One other feature of the story linked above, that I actually find reassuring, is all the references to courts hearing things, and documentary evidence being presented, and whatnot - over two hundred hours of phone transcripts, etc. This is not something that one tends to hear in US reports on similar cases. Don't get me wrong: I'm on balance inclined to believe that (for instance) Jose Padilla probably was on the verge of doing something awful in Chicago, but it would be nice if the system could still have a couple of, you know, checks and balances written into it, just on the off-chance that if someone were to be arrested erroneously - not that that would ever happen! - there might be a chance of it being noticed.