"Aspirational" terror follies

No weapons or explosives were found when FBI agents raided a warehouse where the men lived and trained, with one senior official describing their plans as "aspirational" rather than "operational."—The Telegraph

From the Miami New Times, a funny/sad piece on the Sears Tower "terrorists" the feds nabbed/entrapped in Miami JUST coincidentally when the national media was in town to cover the Heat's NBA title. Here's what happened at the press conference:

At 11:30 a.m., about 30 minutes after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales finished his news conference in Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta took the stage in Miami. Behind him stood two dozen local and federal officials, including Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, Police Chief John Timoney, and Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne. A slender man with thinning brown hair and Dumbo-like ears, Acosta addressed the media with a drawl that implied authority. The seven Miami men, Acosta said, hoped that their attacks would be — in their words — "just as good or greater than 9/11."

Of course, according to the eleven-page indictment distributed at the news conference, the group didn't have any weapons or explosives. And their al Qaeda contact — to whom they allegedly pledged allegiance and asked for $50,000 in funding — was in fact a federal informant.

These guys weren't even being scouted for the al Qaeda farm league. But many of the reporters just didn't seem to get it.

"Was al Qaeda on its way to responding? What kind of feedback did they get?" a female reporter asked, successfully screaming over her colleagues.

"I'm sorry — I don't understand," Acosta replied.

"They asked for money. They asked for weapons. What kind of feedback did they get from al Qaeda?"

Acosta replied that, uh, well, no, al Qaeda was never actually contacted.

"How did they get the $50,000 [from al Qaeda]?" another female reporter queried.

"I'm sorry?" Acosta replied, again baffled by the question.

"You mentioned $50,000," the reporter said.

Acosta replied again that, uh, well, no, al Qaeda was never actually contacted.

Absurd, of course, but sad, really — the clear-cut and incredibly clumsy entrapment notwithstanding, I won't be surprised to see the "Liberty Seven" pay a huge price for letting themselves be talked into a big scheme by an FBI agent.

And of course, irony of ironies, this is MIAMI, where you can't throw a rock without hitting a different sort of terrorist....

No reasonable person doubts that Miami is the terrorist capital of North America. But its resident and reigning terrorists are not indigent black dreamers dependent on helpful federal agents to furnish them with boots and rental cars to case their purported targets. The real terrorists in Miami are well armed and well heeled Cuban exiles, responsible for hundreds of murderous provocations over the last four decades, and endorsed by every president, Republican and Democrat alike over that time. Orlando Bosch, one of the principals involved in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner with 73 innocent civilians aboard, including Cuba’s entire Olympic fencing team lives openly in Miami after receiving a presidential pardon from the first President George Bush.

Hundreds of other local residents are active participants in dozens of organizations which make up the logistic, financial and political sinews of these officially tolerated terrorist networks. And make no mistake about it, these networks are officially tolerated because their targets are Cuban civilians, leftish dissenters within the Cuban American community and the occasional outsourced mercenary gig. Luis Carilles Posada, who the FBI has also linked to the deadly bombing of the Cuban airliner, also boasts of having a hand in the Washington DC assassinations of former Chilean ambassador to the US and his American co-worker.