GOP congresswoman names Iran as the culprit; British police, who made the arrest, have not.

…(cont) Sunday, before a single charge existed, Rep. Kat Cammack told NewsNation's Laura Ingle that "clearly Iran was involved," then added, in the same breath, that this was naturally "going to be investigated and determined." The verdict arrived ahead of the investigation that was supposed to produce it, The Hill reported.

Homeland Security had its own number ready, filed eighteen days earlier. On September 10th, DHS credited ICE with deporting "over 2,000 known or suspected terrorists," a round, unitemized figure timed to land ahead of the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th, the Washington Examiner reported. The same item carries a second, more precise figure — ICE had arrested more than 2,150 known or suspected terrorists — but that number describes arrests, not the deportations DHS was asking to be commended for. Neither count, the round deportation figure or the sharper arrest one, has a name from Fairford attached to it. The five men in a British holding cell were arrested by British police, on British soil, days after DHS closed its books. Nothing in the receipts says either tally was built to reach them, and neither one does.

What ties a deportation count assembled ahead of an anniversary to a bombing plot broken by a foreign police force to a congresswoman naming the country behind it before a charge existed is the order the claims arrive in: certainty first, the evidence assigned to catch up later if it can. Whether American forces keep using bases like Fairford is already an open question inside the war against Iran. Whichever arithmetic gets repeated loudest shapes how that argument gets settled — and as of today, the arithmetic still does not reach the five men actually being held.