There are many incongruities surrounding the arrest of seven men from the impoverished Liberty City neighborhood of Miami on charges of conspiracy to "wage war on the United States" that suggest it, like so many previous "terrorist plots" announced by the Bush administration, is a government-inspired provocation mounted for reactionary political ends.
None of the claims made by the government and repeated uncritically by the media concerning the arrest of these young working-class men can be accepted as good coin. Both the flimsiness of the criminal indictment and the lurid headlines surrounding it mark this event as an escalation in the anti-democratic conspiracies of the Bush administration.
There is every indication that this latest purported terrorist threat—described by some media outlets as "even bigger than September 11"—was manufactured by the FBI, which used an undercover agent posing as a terrorist mastermind to entrap those targeted for arrest.
While the Justice Department declared that the arrests had foiled a plot to blow up the tallest building in the US, the Sears Tower in Chicago, authorities in that city assured its residents that there had never been any threat to the structure.
The four-count indictment presented by the Justice Department in a Miami federal court on Friday contains not a single indication of an overt criminal act or even the means to carry one out. The brief 11-page document consists almost entirely of alleged statements made by the defendants to the FBI informant, referred to in quotes throughout the indictment as "the al Qaeda representative."
The government chose to consummate its entrapment plan by unleashing dozens of combat-equipped federal agents, dressed in olive drab fatigues and carrying automatic weapons, on the predominantly African-American Liberty City neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country. Liberty City was the scene of riots that broke out in 1980 after the acquittal of white police officers for the beating death of a black motorist.
On Thursday, the government's paramilitary squads confronted residents with pictures of the accused, demanding to know their whereabouts. The seven defendants are representative of the impoverished working class population of Miami, including Haitian immigrants.
It appears they were targeted by the FBI because they had formed a religious group, calling themselves the "Seas of David," which reportedly incorporated elements of Christianity and Islam. One of their crimes, according to the FBI's deputy director, John Pistole, was that the Seas of David "did not believe the United States government had legal authority over them."
According to some residents of the neighborhood, the group lived together in the warehouse that was raided by the FBI, using it for religious worship and as a base of operations for a construction business.
Elements of the federal indictment are so self-incriminating as to border on the ludicrous. Among the charges are that the defendants "swore an oath of loyalty to al Qaeda." Who administered this oath? The "al Qaeda representative," AKA, the paid informant of the FBI.
Aside from this "loyalty oath" solicited by the FBI, only one of the seven defendants is accused of any overt act, outside of driving the FBI informant to meetings.
The only action with which this one individual is charged—all else is words—is taking pictures of the FBI headquarters in Miami. Who supplied the camera? The "al Qaeda representative"—i.e., the FBI agent provocateur.
The indictment further charges two of the accused with driving "with the 'al Qaeda representative'" to a store in Dade County, Florida to purchase a memory chip for a digital camera to be used for taking reconnaissance photographs of the FBI building. The document does not say who paid for the chip, but there is hardly room for doubt.
In one of the more curious sections of the indictment, one of the accused, Narseal Batiste, is accused of asking the FBI informant to provide various items for his group, including footwear, for which he provided a "list of shoe sizes." Apparently the FBI delivered the shoes.
Pistole, the FBI deputy director, admitted that the supposed plots to blow up buildings had been "more aspirational than operational." In the raids carried out by the FBI squads, no weapons and no explosive substances were found.
"We preempted their plot," declared Pistole. But the indictment and the facts of the case indicate that the alleged plot would never have existed had the government not planned and instigated it in the first place.
At a Washington press conference, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that the alleged plot had posed no actual danger. He claimed this was because the authorities had intervened "in its earliest stages.
"So early" was the preemption that officials associated with the supposed targets of the plot dismissed the government's indictment. Barbara Carley, the managing director of the Sears Tower, told the press, "Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they've never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that's ever gone beyond just talk."
Her remarks were echoed by Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline, who said, "There never was any credible threat to the Sears Tower at all."
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