OK -- I've read the New York Times story, the Washington Post story, the AP story, the ABC story. I've read about the capture of the al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan a few weeks ago and the capture of the woman with the defaced South African passport in Texas a few days ago. I've read about the meetings of Bush Cabinet members on Friday and Saturday and about the briefing prepared for John Kerry.

This sure sounds a lot more detailed, a lot more credible, than the usually wolf-crying from this administration.

If this is a fake, it's pretty damn elaborate. If it's a fake, these people aren't merely guilty of four years of staggeringly bad judgment -- they operate utterly without a moral compass and are desperate to win an election the way a cornered rat is desperate to live.

If this a fake, they've planted a phony story about that woman's arrest. If it's a fake, they've invented (or perhaps cobbled together from dated terrorist chatter) information about certain buildings that's impressively detailed:

In one example of detailed surveillance cited by a senior administration intelligence official, operatives logged the flow of pedestrians outside one targeted building at midday in the middle of a week. "Fourteen persons pass by every minute" on one side of the block, they concluded.

If it's a fake, the Cabinet meetings were a fake; the Kerry briefing is a fake; fake panic is being spread in New York, New Jersey, D.C. To believe it's a fake, you have to don the tinfoil hat and say things like "Well, he is the son of a former spook; well, America has seen far more bizarre and sinister clandestine plots; well, the woman's arrest did take place in Texas...."

If this is a fake, then the President of the United States is a sociopath.

So I don't know. Is it a fake?