Yesterday, Brian Ross and ABC reported that a Pakistani journalist had attended the graduation ceremony of suicide bombers whose targets are supposedly in the United States and Britain. ABC has included “exclusive” photos of the graduation ceremony.

Although ABC quoted unnamed U.S. intelligence officers saying the photos and video are ”an aggressive and sophisticated propaganda campaign,” ABC’s terrorism analyst, Richard Clarke, had this assessment:

“It doesn’t take too many who are willing to actually do it and be able to slip through the net and get into the United States or England and cause a lot of damage,” said ABC News consultant Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism official.

I agree with Clarke. But, here’s what Clarke had to say about the recent JFK terrorism plot:

Counter Terrorism experts are now saying the alleged plot to blow up fuel tanks and a fuel pipeline at New York.s J-F-K tanks as not very serious. Former chief counter-terrorism adviser in the United States Richard Clarke says the threat was not significant because it never got past the planning stage.
Clarke says the suspects never actually built a bomb or got a hold of any explosives.
Three of the four suspects are in custody and the fourth is believed to be somewhere in Trinidad.

I don’t agree with Clarke. Are we to believe these threats are not serious when ABC doesn’t have the exclusive? Why are years of FBI surveillance less serious than a video of a bunch a guys dressed up with masks in Pakistan?

ABC’s quest for ratings aside, how the media covers these threats — both threats that are nothing more than propaganda to threats from the B-team terrorists — are important. Here are the two best quotes I’ve read on this ambigious terrorism threat, and I think they’re a model on how we should think about incidents like the JFK plot and the recent terrorism graduation ceremony.

Andrew Mc Carthy:

’’The whole goal now is to get these plots at a very nascent stage — and that means the evidence will always be more ambiguous,’’ said Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who pursued terrorism cases in New York and helped investigate the Sept. 11 attacks.
’’We now need to pay a lot more attention to people’s aspirations to commit terror and worry less about how imminent the threat is.’’

Mary Jo White:

’’Obviously, when you speak about these plots, you don’t want to scare the public unnecessarily,’’ she said. ‘’But if we’ve learned anything from 9/11 it is we should never again fail to take seriously the lower-level terrorist or wannabe terrorist or the most seemingly apocryphal plot, because they may well occur.’’