Britain's top counterterror officer says the danger is the commentary, aimed at the Washington officials doing the commentating.

…(cont) That is the official line, and it holds up on its face — an active case run by British police does not get clearer when foreign officials narrate it before the facts are settled. Consider it from the chief's chair: five men in custody, an investigation into a plot targeting a joint air base, and a separate Washington Examiner piece the same week raising the possibility the men were simply stealing fuel. Two American storylines — confirmed plot, maybe nothing at all — running at the same volume out of the same capital.

Senior officials have every reason to reassure the public about security at a base American forces use, and that reassurance is — actually, that's the harder sentence to finish, because the base sits in England, under British law, in a British investigation, and an American statement calling it a confirmed terror case is a guess made in public about someone else's open case.

Officials talking doesn't invent a threat out of thin air. It's a description of one the police already made when they made the arrests. Sunday is when the men were taken in; early September is as far back as the plot itself goes in the record. The arrest is the fact. The talk is what's new, and "international commentary" heightening "worry" doesn't mean the underlying case got weaker or that British investigators — well, no. That's not what the chief said either.

Nobody disputes the base. Nobody disputes the arrests. What's being disputed is whether Washington gets to hold the microphone on an investigation it doesn't run, and the chief just answered that in public, on the record, out loud.