By NiallO’Dowd

“IN retrospect,” said Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counter terrorism in the New York Police Department, ”there may have been too much hyperventilating going on.”

Sheehan was referring to the global crisis created when British al-Qaeda terror suspects had planned to bring down airliners between Britain and the U.S. in their latest attempt at mass murder.

But how real was the imminent threat? The New York Times investigated the case fully this week and came up with some interesting conclusions.

The estimate of 10 planes being targeted was “speculative and exaggerated” according to a senior British official. The suspects had neither made plane reservations or purchased plane tickets. Two of the key plotters did not even have passports.

Since the mass arrests earlier this month over half have been freed without charge, including the man originally identified as the chief plotter, along with his brother in Pakistan.

“As more information was analyzed the British government decided the attack was not imminent,” The Times reported. Oh.

Remember all those headlines screaming imminent attack scaring the bejayus out of us? And all the headlines predicting the actual date was within a week or so? “Senior officials have characterized the remarks as unfortunate,” The Times soberly reported.

Remember Michael Chertoff, head of the Department of Homeland Security, describing the operation as “getting really quite close to the execution stage.” Not too close, it now seems.

What are we to make of this? Yes, there was a terror plot it seems, but it was nowhere near fruition as we had been led to believe. Also, the suspects were clearly quite amateurish rather than the slick al-Qaeda underlings we were led to believe as helming the plot.

The plotters were under 24 hour surveillance and seemed to have no idea how to create the chemical explosion they were hoping for from liquid items brought on board a plane. A chemist who is involved in the inquiry stated the chemicals to be used were “in theory dangerous,” but doubted whether the mainly unemployed and unskilled plotters had the know-how to pull it off.

Perhaps we should be wary because of some previous experiences with British authorities such as MI5 when it comes to terrorism.

Back when the IRA was the target many innocent people were victimized. Remember the Guildford 4 and Birmingham Six?

In the Guildford Four case, the innocent suspects were paraded through the media. One old lady even had her very own bomb factory in her kitchen, according to reports at the time. “Aunt Annie’s Bomb Kitchen” screamed one famous newspaper headline.

The poor lady was utterly innocent, as were all the others charged and convicted in the bombings. The stories of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four are writ large in the Hall of Shame.

A cautionary tale, perhaps, at a time when we are inundated with warnings of our imminent exposure to bombings or much worse, and everyone is a suspect. Don’t believe everything you read, or the self-styled “terrorism experts” who are two a penny on television these days.

The facts are that it is a dangerous world, ever more so since September 11, but we need not be in the state of constant panic and fear that much of the media and many of the “experts” prefer us to be in.

The facts in this case are that there was no imminent threat, and a huge amount of hyperventilation has been going on. We need to be told the truth and the facts, not the fevered speculation that passes for it.