FEAR Unit: After The Fear Goes Away

For those joining us late, I often discuss FEAR Unit, the Federal Election-year Anti-terror Response Unit, which exists to promote seemingly bogus terror attacks just to keep everybody afraid. One of their greatest hits was the "Liberty City 7," the group in Miami that was plotting to blow up the Sears Tower - even though they didn't have enough money to buy their own shoes. Well, that trial finally wound up this week, and, um...

A jury in Miami has cleared one man of trying to blow up America's tallest building, the Sears Tower in Chicago, as part of a holy war.

The jury was unable to reach a verdict on six other defendants, and the judge declared a mistrial. Prosecutors say they plan to try them again next year.

This was a group of nuts who had no operational ability to pull off anything approaching a terror attack. The only person they managed to contact to help them on this "quest" was an FBI informant, and it looked suspiciously that the informant pushed them into whatever it is they were supposed to be doing. Yet it looks good in the papers for there to be "successes" in thwarting terror plots (that the FBI creates and nurtures). Meanwhile, actual domestic terror plots go unnoticed.

Rameau says that the Liberty City Seven coverage has upstaged other important news. In a conversation with RAW STORY earlier this week, he said that on the day of the Liberty City arrests, “a former director of the right-wing Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) admitted to planning terrorist acts against Cuba.”

Yet this “failed either to draw national attention or merit ‘above the fold’ coverage on the front page of the Miami Herald,” said Rameau.

The CANF conspirators were charged and acquitted by a Puerto Rican jury in 1997, after a federal judge threw out one of the defendants' self-incriminating statements. No charges have ever been brought against the individuals on the U.S. mainland.

Rameau notes that while the government has taken action against "men with little to no demonstrable capacity to advance their plans beyond the discussion stage,” it has refused to extradite – or prosecute – Luis Posada, suspected mastermind of the bombing of a Cuban airliner “full of human beings” in 1976.

And in this environment, where counter-terrorism has been totally politicized, Jane Harman wants to bring up something as stupid like her thought police counter-terrorism bill. Crazy.