Would it be Wrong of Me to Ask Why Now? (Miami Terrorist Arrests)

First, I want to make clear that if there were a terrorist cell of any kind, I’m very glad and grateful that our government has the capacity to find it and break it up.  Now that I’ve said it, I have to bring up some of the peculiar aspects of this most recent arrest.  First, five of the suspects are American citizens.  Second, while they may have tried to contact Al Qaeda, it doesn’t appear that any of the seven are Moslem.  The local Mosques deny that any of these men were members of the Moslem community.  Third, they didn’t have any weapons or explosives.  

For those advocating profiling of terror suspects, these facts pose a few problems.  First, it’s one thing if those living outside the United States allegedly hate the United States and freedom and democracy so much that they want to kill us.  What am I supposed to make of the fact that five Americans are angry or crazy enough to plot to blow up the Sears Tower?  They also don’t simply appear to be thugs or at least not simple ones.  One of the reports suggests that members of this group were actively involved in providing food and clothes for the poorest people in perhaps the most impoverished area of Miami, Liberty City. I guess I shouldn't mention that Congress recently refused to raise the Federal minimum wage from 5.15/hour.   

The party line has been that terrorists are jealous of America, so they want to blow us up.  The actual terrorists who have gone to trial have tended to be individuals like Moussaoui and Richard Reid who managed in any number of ways to appear too insane to be a reliable part of an intricate plot that would call for months of secrecy, careful planning, and demand that a number of elements of the plot be executed competently.  In fact, the closest this group appears to have gotten to Al Qaeda was to contact an FBI undercover agent posing as an Al Qaeda operative.  This is the biggest domestic terrorist arrest in two years?  With all due respect to the fine agents who worked this case, if this is the most tangible evidence of the effectiveness of the Department of Homeland Security and terrorism is that real and big a threat here….well you castch my drift….

I pair this with Rick Santorum and Peter Hoekstra’s announcement of intelligence data of the 500 WMD found in Iraq.  It turns out that they were found in 2004 and it’s 500 shell casings that may have contained sarin and/or mustard gas from before the 1991 war.  In other words, they’re not proof that Saddam had an active WMD program of any kind on the eve of the war.  Or that’s the best you’ve got after three years of occupation to show that Saddam was an imminent threat?

Can I ask a question?   Why don’t either of these news items make me feel either safer or more confident in the people running this country?  



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