A solitary intercepted phone call, over 800 police bursting into homes in Sydney and Brisbane, hovering helicopters, 15 arrested and detained, four charged.

The charge against Omarjan Azari, aged 22, is conspiracy to prepare for a terrorist attack. The prosecution alleges, “there was a clear imperative to commit an act to shock, horrify and terrify the community as a whole”. The plan allegedly involved “random selection of persons to rather gruesomely execute”.

Stripped of all the crypto-military flourishes and the connection with Islamic fundamentalism, the charge might have been conspiracy or solicit to murder, under section 26 Crimes Act, NSW. Another man was charged with firearms and ammunition offences and released on bail.

Soon, the politicians were on the job. NSW premier Mike Baird, usually a pusillanimous sort of character, adopted George W Bush’s rhetoric: “We will hunt you down.” The prime minister, speaking in the Northern Territory before sending troops off to fight Isis in Iraq, has already found the charged man guilty: “So this is not just suspicion, this is intent.”

We don’t actually know the details of the evidence against Azari, and because it is wrapped in the shroud of counter-terrorism some of the proceedings against him will be in-camera on the tenuous ground of national security. This could all have been achieved much more stealthily and proportionally, but that would have stripped the occasion of the opportunity for some serious theatre.

The media were duly recruited and the major mainstream TV outlets supplied with footage of the commando-style operations, filmed and supplied by the police themselves. The police also helpfully supplied still shots of the action to the newspapers.

Most of the media laps this up with its ears back as willing pawns in the politics of terror drama – a readiness to be used by the very governments which go to extraordinary lengths to deprive journalists and the public of information. The secrecy surrounding Operation Sovereign Borders is an obvious example, where details are only ever released if it suits the government. It seems large and supposedly influential media organisations are quite willing to be played like a trout. As British politician Aneurin Bevan put it rather wonderfully when talking about Fleet Street, censorship and political patronage during the time of the Attlee government: “There is absolutely no need to muzzle sheep.”

If a little scepticism was applied, questions would be asked as to why we had this sudden splash of commando bombast when this particular group in Sydney had been under surveillance since May. Suddenly it is crystallised into the need for immediate action – no questions asked.

Why, for instance, did it take so long to twig to the fact that there was a $9m discrepancy in the funds that had been sent by a Lakemba money transfer business to the Middle East? That was the undisclosed amount that headed to “high terrorism financing risk jurisdictions” – and had been going on since January.

The Sydney Morning Herald revealed on Monday that the the armed wing of the PKK, which Australia has designated as a terrorism organisation, is working alongside the Kurdish Peshmerga forces which simultaneously Australia is arming. If our media sleuths had a nose for this, they might try and cut through the rhetoric and work out whether the relevant security agencies have really been on the ball.

Needless to say, the intelligence that formed the basis of the raised raids in Sydney and Brisbane on Thursday was gathered without the need to retain the entire nation’s metadata for two years.

“Right now is a time for calm,” said the NSW police commissioner Andrew Scipione. “We don’t need to whip this up.” However, the message the politicians were trying to get across was, “Now’s the time for you to be desperately anxious.” The Navy at Garden Island spent this morning blaring “alert ... alert ... alert” throughout the neighbourhood, accompanied by various head-splitting whoops and sirens.

As a result, moderate mainstream Muslims have been put in a dreadful position, with raucous elements of the media and the population beating-up the unrest. This will be a real test to see that Australia’s peaceful multicultural cohesion is not hijacked. In the meantime, only when a court determines the weight of the actual evidence still being gathered will we be in a better position to know what Azari has been up to.