Spencer Ackerman June 4, 2007, 4:18 PM

If there’s one thing the JFK terror plot doesn’t need, it’s more obfuscation from senior officials. Take a look at what Michael Balboni, head of public safety for New York State, just told Contessa Brewer of MSNBC.

BREWER: Let’s talk about [alleged ringleader Russell] Defreitas. We just are seeing this new video in where he was meeting with a person he thought was in on the plot — turns out that that was an informant for the investigators. What are they learning about this plot, how close were we to really being in danger?

BALBONI: Contessa, when you read through the indictment, what you see here is a concerted effort on behalf of more than one person trying to recruit, going overseas, trying to get money, trying to get the wherewithal to come in and to attack and identify a target — and remember that Mr. Defreitas had knowledge because he worked at the airport. And, again, in the indictment is information that was recorded through various surveillance means. But also information taken from the confidential informant where this guy really wanted to do this. We’re now seeing all these sorts of other kinds of questions about, could he do it, could he not do it. What everyone needs to appreciate is that there are suspicious activity reports that are produced daily: somebody videotaping this, somebody trying to find out information about this critical infrastructure. Here when you have a plot like this that has been this dedicated this much time and effort put into it, it really does signal that this is a real thing.

With this brief statement, Balboni went a long way to muddying the public case against the four alleged conspirators. First, in today’s New York Times, law enforcement officials labored to counter the impression left over the weekend that the plot was anything close to being realized. By ducking Brewer’s question about “how close” we came to attack and emphasizing a “concerted effort,” Balboni left the distinct impression that we nearly lost JFK. So much for message discipline.

More importantly, Balboni advised viewers to “remember that Mr. Defreitas had knowledge because he worked at the airport.” And it’s there that the capabilities of the attackers most directly come into question. Yet Defreitas’s long-ago experience at JFK didn’t tip him to the safeguards in place at the fuel tanks he wanted to explode in the hopes of taking out the airport — mistakenly telling an associate, “If you hit them tanks, that’s the whole terminal down.” What’s more, according to the criminal complaint against Defreitas, his surveillance of the airport was so poor that it needed to be supplemented by GoogleEarth imagery. This is the guy who the Joint Terrorism Task Force’s informant referred to as “the sheikh” — in other words, the ringleader of the plot. If Defreitas is the sheikh, the easily-penetrated plot didn’t have much of a chance from the jump. Nefarious intentions aren’t the same thing as actual capabilities.

The accumulated evidence in the complaint is more than enough to warrant the indictment of Defreitas and his alleged co-conspirators. Assuming that Trinidad and Tobago extradites Kareem Ibrahim and Abdul Kadir to the U.S., and Abdel Nur is found, they and Defreitas will face their day in court, as is appropriate. But if Balboni wants to make the case that we should take the plot seriously, he shouldn’t need to strain to portray it as “the real thing.”