Miami's "7 Boobs"

After the Bush administration trumpeted the arrest of 7 terrorism suspects in Miami as a major victory, claiming that the group had ties to al Qaeda and was plotting attacks on the Sears Tower and government buildings, a slightly different story is emerging as more details come to light.

Recent pieces in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Time magazine, and the Washington Post suggest that the "Miami 7" were nothing more than blundering malcontents who posed no real threat. The group had no weapons, explosives, money, or other means to carry out a terrorist plot, and was described as being "embryonic at best". Reflecting their utter incompetence and stupidity (many of the men talked openly with strangers of their excitement to be "waging jihad" against America), the New York Daily News has titled the group the "7 Boobs". Furthermore, the "al Qaeda ties" of the group were actually ties to an FBI informant posing as an al Qaeda member -- no one in the group ever made contact with an actual al Qaeda member.

Of course it was good that these men were arrested, as they certainly had every intention of causing harm to innocent Americans. It was good to arrest them, even if the odds of them causing serious harm were pretty slim, since they are the type of people who are willing to do terrible things, given the right supplies and funding.

The questionable aspect of the operation isn't in the way it was actually conducted, but in the way it was spun by the Bush administration, who seems ever more desperate to claim victories and stoke people's fears, making more of the threat than really existed. The group has been repeatedly referred to by administration officials as if it was a highly disciplined and well organized group close to launching attacks, when in fact just the opposite has turned out to be true. Dick Cheney, for example, claimed that the group was a "very real threat". With what we know now about their lack of resources and preparation, as well as their utter stupidity, this kind of characterization is a bit much.

The Carpetbagger Report blog has a good roundup with links to the above-mentioned stories, along with some interesting thoughts on the Bush administration's record of exaggerating their counterterror achievements, as in the cases of Jose Padilla, the Brooklyn Bridge torch scheme, and many other cases (link here).