The Miami al Qaida Wannabes

The FBI did its job and that's fine. I'm not sure the public relations angle from the Bush Administration is any more honest than usual, though. I have to admit American mythology does bring to mind that it might have been better to send men with butterfly nets to capture this particular group of 'terrorists.'

Tony Karon of Time magazine has the story on the Seas of David cult:

Was this an al-Qaeda-linked plot, or were these men simply wannabes?

From initial reports and the contents of the indictment, the latter seems most likely. The arrested men appear to be part of a cult organization proclaiming itself to be Muslim — although a member of the same religious group says it is, in fact, based on a homebrew of Islam and Christianity, and calls itself "Seas of David." Its members, mainly Americans and Haitan immigrants, clearly have an enthusiasm for emulating and following al-Qaeda. But their only "connection" with al-Qaeda appears to have been the fact that a government informant who had infiltrated their ranks had apparently convinced the alleged conspirators that he was, in fact, a Qaeda operative. The oaths of allegiance to the organization alleged by the indictment to have been taken by the accused were administered not by any representative of the organization, but to a U.S. government agent posing as a Qaeda operative.

(snip)

Fevered minds can be very dangerous, of course. But the threat they present is quite different from that of transnational terror groups. After all, the government appears to have had no problem infiltrating and exposing this group, which was hardly making itself inconspicuous or impregnable — unlike the New York subway plot reported in TIME this week, whose perpetrators slipped into the U.S., conducted their surveillance, prepared the operational details of poison gas attacks, then aborted them on instructions from al-Qaeda leaders and departed America, all with U.S. security none the wiser.

As long as it isn't politically motivated, I don't mind the FBI getting headlines and credit for rounding up people if they're making real threats against the US, but we would all be better off if the FBI did a better job of concentrating on the professionals rather than the amateurs. In retrospect, it's too bad a Christian preacher or Muslim cleric didn't reach out to these impressionable individuals and advocate peace and nonviolence. Cynics on both the right and left should remember that it's been known to work sometimes in the last thousand years or so.