Finally an arrest in the little terror case that could. If you picked up the paper today, you read that Najibullah Zazi, along with his father, Mohammed and an Astoria imam named Ahmad Wais Afzali were arrested on charges of “making a false statement in a matter involving international and domestic terrorism.”

I guess you go to war with the army you’ve got.

In the spirit of transparency, here are those false statements from the criminal complaints against Zazi, his father and the Imam:

This may buy the Feds some time and leverage to stitch together a more, er, substantive case against Zazi. If there is one there. 

But, is that the ultimate point? The plot–if there was one–was disrupted. The suspects–whether they are guilty or not–are now known to every law enforcement agency on earth as suspected terrorists. The threat, it seems, has been diminished.

Any prosecution that follows serves a separate purpose. Namely to illustrate that the war on terror can be fought in the courts, as well as, on the battlefield. Some would argue that Al Qaeda and its sympathizers have used our legal system and its ugly siblings (military commissions) to illustrate that our society is not up to this task, because our system is inherently corrupt and unjust. Those who’d like to respond to that argument, could certainly benefit from an example of due process working correctly. We’ll see whether this case is it.

A few things to note:

•  Zazi’s cross-country tour put him in NYC around Sept. 11th. 
• Zazi allegedly used two pseudonyms for email accounts–one of which he received the handwritten bomb-making notes: Kado Khan and Kado Gul.

Some perfunctory reading tells us that a Kado Khan was executed for his part in a plot to kill a sovereign who had taken control of Kandahar in the 18th century. For history without context, its not clear where that gets us.

Maybe his aspiration was to get caught?