Friday, June 23, 2006

 

Geez, Can't They Make Up Their Minds?

Even as we're being told by FOX and MSGOP MSNBC that seven guys were busted the other day for allegedly planning to TAKE OUT THE SEARS TOWER IN CHICAGO and that they were about to pull off something BIGGER THAN 9/11, we find buried in the hoo-ha this little tidbit:

There is no imminent threat to Miami or any other area because of these operations," said Richard Kolko, spokesman for FBI headquarters in Washington. He declined further comment.
"No imminent threat". Got that? They were about to pull off something "bigger than 9/11", but they were "no imminent threat". Geez, can't the Bushistas make up their minds here? And it turns out, the more one reads past the headlines, that the seven guys busted were little more than idiot teens and twentysomethings who got trapped in an FBI sting, similar to the Canadian idiots trapped by an RCMP sting:
Narseal Batiste, the leader, told the FBI informant posing as the Al Qaeda agent that he was experiencing delays "because of various problems within his organization."
Seems that his biggest problem was that neither he nor his young group of runaway teens and twentysomethings had anything resembling a clue:
One source said the suspects had been trying to buy weapons and other things needed to carry out attacks. Ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer compound that can also be used as an explosive, was reportedly among the items.
"Trying" to buy weapons?! Hell, thanks to the NRA, any semi-competent street gang can gather up tons of weapons, legal and otherwise, without risking much in the way of punishment or even detection. (The arsenal that the infamous baby-raper Vernon "David Koresh" Howell acquired was so nasty that the FBI, expecting to take serious damage, brought along to Waco a "tank retriever" -- which is used to fetch disabled tanks and get them out of harm's way.) As for the fertilizer compound: Hello?! Most any gardening store stocks that. Landscaping and farm supply firms buy and sell the stuff in bulk all the time. If you're dead broke, you do what the meth-lab guys do and steal the stuff from a farmer or two. But it sure gives Bush some nice "I saved the WORLD!" headlines going into the weekend, doesn't it? UPDATE: Ensley, a frequent commenter over at Steve Gilliard's blog, brings up the likelihood that the kiddies were thinking of this tower when they talked to FBI agents about blowing up a "Sears Tower":
phoenix woman, to a kid in the Liberty City area of Miami, this is the Sears Tower -- not some building in Chicago. It's all that's left of the old Sears Building on Biscayne Blvd in Liberty City. Since I no longer live in Miami, I can't tell you what stage of construction it is at, but it supposed to be part of a new Performing Arts Center. These kids probably never even heard of the building in Chicago.
Lovely.


# posted by Phoenix Woman @ 6/23/2006 12:25:00 PM
Comments:
Well, thankfully these idiots will continue to be "no imminent threat" since they're now in jail. At what point would you prefer this group have been broken up? Maybe when they had the arms necessary to shoot back at the agents coming to arrest them? Or maybe after they'd finally figured out how to make fertilizer bomb? Or would you have preferred that they be pulled over as they were driving the bomb to whatever building they finally decided to attack?

Myself? I'm glad they were caught well before they could be viewed as anything more than a group of kids with big ideas and no clues.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 6/24/2006 03:51:00 PM
 
Hey, that's a good idea!

Maybe we could have arrested them when we first realized they were black.

Look: The case will play out in the courts, and we will discover whether these guys were a threat, as the government contends, or were just punks trying to con a sugar daddy into giving them money as I suspect will emerge.

What's clear is we didn't need a major league press conference to announce this arrest. This was all about publicity and nothing about protecting the country.

And even though I was ribbing you about arresting them just because of their skin color, you should think seriously about what it means to arrest someone for just talking. A lot of wives would end up in the electric chair if the standard for conviction was saying, "I could just kill that man.

Husbands too, maybe.
# posted by Blogger Charles : 6/24/2006 06:59:00 PM
 
The saddest thing about people like you, sfc b, is that you think that you'd have no problem at all in a dictatorship such as the one that Bush and his string-pullers are trying to create -- because you think you'd be among the Chosen Ones that get to reap the bennies. But you'd be shat on just like the rest of us. Worse, you'd be cannon fodder for whatever military make-work project Halliburton wanted.
# posted by Blogger Phoenix Woman : 6/24/2006 07:08:00 PM
 
sargeant 1st class bull$hit just doesn't get it. This is a typical wag-the-dog weapon of mass distraction.

These guys were entrapped, basically, into thinking they could blow up a local White Castle, fer frackin sake, and they were even too mentally incompetent to put together that.

It's a joke. The media likes jokes. That's why they gave us Bush.
# posted by Blogger shrimplate : 6/25/2006 09:42:00 PM
 
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