Because the young man, Salam Ibrahim El Zaatari, was from Lebanon, Francis was soon asked to get involved in the case. The American Lebanese Congress works to improve relations between Arabs, Christians and Jews; Francis has been honored for his activism by an invitation to the White House, courtesy of former first lady Hillary Clinton. The transportation engineer says he was initially skeptical about El Zaatari’s innocence. “If he was guilty, then I didn’t want to get involved with him,” Francis recalls. “I wouldn’t have anything to do with someone like that.”

Six weeks after El Zaatari’s arrest, his advocates — including an outraged Malek Francis — say the former Art Institute of Pittsburgh student was guilty of nothing more than failing to notify immigration officials that he’d left school, and forgetting he had a disposable utility knife he used in his artwork tucked into his laptop case when he boarded a Northwest Airlines plane bound for Beirut via Detroit and Amsterdam. Since then, he’s been held without bail in Allegheny County Jail, locked 23 hours a day in a cramped protective custody cell, frightened of the other prisoners who have threatened to kill the accused “terrorist.”

A week ago Attorney General John Ashcroft released El Zaatari’s name along with 93 others who were charged with federal crimes after the aggressive anti-terror sweep spurred by the Sept. 11 attacks. But the U.S. attorney’s office has offered no evidence linking the art student with any terror activities, and several law enforcement officials have admitted they don’t think there is any. They defend El Zaatari’s prosecution nonetheless, insisting he broke a federal law by carrying weapons on an airplane. Holding him without bail is necessary, they say, because he’s a flight risk.

But his defenders insist federal officials are making an example of El Zaatari, and say he’d never have been detained in the first place if it wasn’t a time when Americans look twice at young Middle Eastern men.

“Everyone knows he’s harmless,” insists Francis, who discovered that the young man he initially thought might be a terrorist came from the same town he did, Saida, Lebanon. El Zaatari turned out to be the nephew of Francis’s high school principal, a courageous man who prevented marauding Palestinian militia men from kidnapping Christians like Francis from school, a few times receiving vicious beatings for his efforts. Now Francis is grateful for the chance to return the favor to young El Zaatari, even offering his house as collateral in an attempt to free the young man on bail, but so far his efforts have been unsuccessful.

“If he were connected to organizations or knew anyone it might be different, but he isn’t,” says an angry Francis. “In fact, his family has been victims of fanatics in Lebanon. It’s time to let this poor guy go home.”

That’s exactly what El Zaatari says he was trying to do Oct. 28. Although he wanted to stay in the U.S., his father, a prominent Lebanese banker, had urged him to return home because of the angry backlash against Arabs in America the older man had seen on CNN. The son had been a little worried, too; for weeks after the attacks, friends say, he avoided leaving the house, for fear of the American reaction to an Arab-looking stranger. But he was emotional about having to leave his friends, says roommate Charles Piatt, and he worried that if the war on terrorism escalated he would not be able to return to America for a long time.

Piatt was one of five American friends who dropped El Zaatari off at Pittsburgh International Airport; he had even helped his friend pack, because he’d procrastinated much of the day and was in danger of missing his flight, Piatt recalls. The former art student breezed through two security checkpoints without a pause. But at the gate a Northwestern employee hand-searched El Zaatari’s laptop case and found among pencils, pens, and other work supplies the disposable utility knife, commonly used by graphic artists. Facing a Middle Eastern man with an accent carrying an object that seemed comparable to a box cutter — the Sept. 11 hijackers’ weapon of choice — the employee quickly alerted the FBI agent on duty at the airport. Piatt was shocked that night after returning home from the airport to hear his friend’s name on the 11 o’clock news as a suspected terrorist.

“Anyone who’s talked to Salam knows he’s not what they made him look like in the news,” Piatt said. “He’s one of the most laid-back, peace-loving people I know.”

Some of El Zaatari’s problems were simple bad luck. Had one of the two metal detectors he passed through found the blade, it would have simply been taken away; because he was at the gate it was a more serious transgression. And before Sept. 11, it would have been legal for him to carry that type of knife on an airplane.

During the FBI interview, El Zaatari told the agent he had forgotten the instrument was in his bag and didn’t even know it was now prohibited on planes. He had been carrying it with his other work supplies for months; in fact it had been in his bag two months before, when he had flown back to Lebanon to visit his family. When the agent asked if he’d known that the Sept. 11 terrorists had used box cutters, El Zaatari said no, a claim that was ultimately used against him, because the FBI later found magazine and newspaper articles about Sept. 11 in El Zaatari’s luggage, which they say proved that he knew what weapons the hijackers carried.

FBI agents visited the house where Piatt, El Zaatari and other students lived in the days after the arrest. Piatt described his creative friend — the two met sitting on their neighboring porches in the evenings, and found that they shared a love of movies and eventually worked on screenplays together — and said that El Zaatari had been researching film schools to attend and hoped to eventually work in Hollywood. In fact, he had clipped the articles about Sept. 11 that the FBI found suspicious because he intended to make a documentary on the tragedy. El Zaatari had made a similar documentary years before, interviewing his friends about the Lebanese civil war; the film was later shown in Lebanese schools.

The FBI agent who visited Piatt asked if there were any other knives like the one confiscated at the airport in the house. “There are art supplies all around the house,” Piatt said; all his roommates are involved in the arts. “In any room, there are art kits that have those types of knives.” He reached into his coat pocket, he says, and produced two he had been using earlier in the day.

The FBI also asked why El Zaatari’s flight to Beirut was booked through Detroit, which has one of the largest concentrations of Middle Eastern immigrants and has been home to suspected terrorists. Piatt was there when El Zaatari first made flight reservations, he said, and it was simply the first and least expensive flight the travel agent found. His friend had no special reason to travel through Detroit, Piatt said.

Piatt thought that the answers he and his roommates provided, as well as their descriptions of El Zaatari’s character, would help the government realize that the young man in custody was no threat. “I expected them to do a background check and then let him go,” he said.

Instead, the U.S. attorney’s office indicted El Zaatari Nov. 1 on one count of carrying a weapon on an aircraft, a federal offense.

Supporters still didn’t panic. Francis went to downtown Pittsburgh’s Federal Building for El Zaatari’s Nov. 5 bail hearing convinced the young man would be released from jail, and they’d work on his defense together. But although the pretrial report recommended that El Zaatari be granted bail with electronic monitoring and other close supervision, Assistant U.S. Attorney Constance Bowden asked for remand without bail, claiming there were no measures that could assure El Zaatari’s appearance in court.

The U.S. attorney’s office did not think El Zaatari was a danger to the public, she admitted in testimony, but saw him as a flight risk. She noted that his student visa was out of status, since he was no longer enrolled in school, that he was not employed, and that he “has no real ties to this country, really, has no reason being here.” She also introduced as “relevant” the fact that he’d admitted to the FBI agent and to a pretrial officer that he smoked marijuana.

Still, Francis wasn’t worried about bail. “She didn’t put up any kind of good argument; I thought it was a clear victory,” he said. “I thought he was going home with me that day.”

But the judge agreed with the U.S. attorney that El Zaatari was a flight risk, and denied him bail. In an appeal, a second judge came to the same conclusion.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Francis said. “When they denied him bail, they had all the reports about him, they knew in their hearts that what he did was only a stupid mistake.”

Since taking office Sept. 17, Pittsburgh-based U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan has promised that she would deal forcefully with terrorists, and since then she’s had her hands full. Unbelievably, of the 93 cases Ashcroft has identified as being charged with federal crimes in connection with the Sept. 11 dragnet, 26 were in Pittsburgh. Twenty-two of those (mostly Arab men) were in connection with a false-license scheme uncovered in early October; El Zaatari was one of four other unrelated cases.

In a phone interview, Buchanan says that the government’s treatment of El Zaatari is “an instance of the U.S. attorney enforcing the law, period.”

When asked if she thought El Zaatari was a terrorist or involved with terrorists, Buchanan said that she “couldn’t comment on that” because once someone is indicted, “normally, we don’t say anything about pending cases.” She firmly denies that El Zaatari is being tried because of politics or ethnic prejudice. “Mr. Zaatari has not been treated any differently than any other individual given the same facts and circumstances,” she said. “If you had done the same thing, you would face federal prosecution, too.”

But El Zaatari’s criminal lawyer, Tony Mariani, says the government is guilty of selective prosecution — that knives and other sharp instruments have been found on people in Pittsburgh International Airport, but that El Zaatari has been the only one charged with a crime — and he’s filed a motion to dismiss the case. “Mr. El Zaatari’s prosecution is not fueled by his possession of a cutting instrument but rather by the fact that Mr. El Zaatari is of Middle Eastern descent,” the motion reads. He has filed another dismissal motion on the grounds that the law itself is vague, and that the FAA announcement of increased security only mentioned that such “cutting instruments” would be confiscated, not that anyone would be arrested.

There have been some mixed signals from the U.S. attorney’s office as to whether officials believe El Zaatari is involved with terrorism. Buchanan insists she can’t make a statement one way or another, although in the case of the false licensing scheme, she was quick to tell the media that none of the men were suspected of terrorist ties. But she won’t clear El Zaatari. “Normally, we don’t say anything about pending cases,” she said. “In a case that gets so much attention, if we are able to make comments, we do.” She cleared the 22 false-license detainees because “there was great concern in the public about the incident,” and because those people had been released on bond and were back in public. “It was appropriate to provide the information we did,” she says.

But while Buchanan doesn’t feel comfortable making statements about the El Zaatari case, others in her office do. At the bail hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bowden said she and her colleagues “do not and have not indicated that we have any particular links with the defendant to terrorism.” Another assistant U.S. attorney, Paul Brysh, was even more certain, telling the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week that none of the people arrested in Pittsburgh were suspected of terrorism or any connection with Sept. 11. Brysh confirmed the quote in a phone interview, and said the U.S. attorney’s office does not believe El Zaatari has any connection with terrorists or terrorism.

Attorney Bob Deasy, who is handling the immigration side of El Zaatari’s case regarding his out-of-status student visa, said that his client “was caught up in Ashcroft’s sweep.” Before Sept. 11, there was almost no way a client in El Zaatari’s situation would have been denied bail, Deasy says. In fact, he almost certainly would never have been arrested: The INS either ignored students with out-of-status visas, or wrote a letter and asked them to come in and explain their situation. But because at least some of the Sept. 11 hijackers entered on student visas, cases like El Zaatari’s are getting greater scrutiny, and many in his situation now have to leave the country.

That may well be El Zaatari’s plight, but before that he’s likely to spend at least two more months in jail, since his case isn’t expected to go to trial before February. Piatt said his friend’s spirits were a bit higher during their last visit, because El Zaatari had been allowed to make Christmas ornaments for the jail’s tree. But Francis says the last time he visited El Zaatari, the young man spent more time crying than talking, worried about his future and how this ordeal was affecting his family. Francis’ concern for El Zaatari extends beyond his possible trial: “He might be in danger when he gets back home. Maybe the Palestinians think he’s a spy or that he came back as a CIA agent. That’s what scares me.”

Although Francis doesn’t fault the government’s initial scrutiny of El Zaatari, he said that this case has made him skeptical of John Ashcroft’s claims that the war against terror is not being waged at the expense of individual rights. In fact, El Zaatari’s inclusion on Ashcroft’s terror-detainee list seems proof that his arrest and detention had something to do with politics and ethnic profiling. If El Zaatari had been a 70-year-old priest or an 8-year-old boy who had made the same mistake, it is very unlikely he would have been arrested and charged with a felony, much less detained without bail.

“I can understand why [the government] took it so seriously,” Piatt said, “but when you know a person has no malice or malicious intent, you expect it to be resolved quickly.”

“Since Sept. 11, people are scared,” Francis adds. “I don’t blame them for being scared. I’m scared too. But sometimes people react without thinking. That’s the most scary of all.”

The newspaper account of the debate in The Hill just reinforced the Republican spin, highlighting the Democrats’ decision to make people spend more money on the hated TSA and downplaying the actual existing Republican alternative to the proposal, which was not “spend less on the hated TSA” but rather “raise money for the hated TSA by slashing needed aid to states.” The Democrats won, or “won,” and now they will earn the fruits of that victory: well-deserved scorn from everyone. And Ben Nelson (D-Troll Town) voted with the Republicans. (Though surely having users pay the fees for supposedly necessary security measures is perfectly conservative, isn’t it? Am I missing something here? I mean besides the fact that the two sides in this debate weren’t actually “liberal” and “conservative” but rather “people who want to come up with a way of paying for the oppressive and useless national security state” versus “people who want there to be an oppressive national security state but hate government spending on feeding and sheltering impoverished people.”)

I don’t know of anyone not employed by the TSA or some other arm of Homeland Security that believes the TSA does a good job and deserves its massive budget, but everyone in Washington apparently feels differently (and is terrified of being blamed for “voting to cut TSA funding” if there is another terrifying and deadly underwear bomber, of course). This is why everyone hates politics and Congress and Washington. This and Iraq. And the drug war.

The area was evacuated for two hours until a bomb squad determined that the device was not dangerous.

At about 2 a.m. Saturday, a police officer discovered Miyakawa on a ladder not far from where the first contraption was found. Police said he was tying a similar “I Love New York” bag to a public lamp post.

Miyakawa was charged with two counts of first-degree reckless endangerment, two counts of placing a false bomb or hazardous substance in the first degree, two counts of placing a false bomb or hazardous substance in the second degree, two counts of second-degree reckless endangerment and two counts of second-degree criminal nuisance.

A judge ordered him held pending a psychiatric evaluation. His lawyer, Deborah J. Blum, said Monday that she is filing for emergency relief to have Miyakawa released. A court date was set for June 21 to review the results of the evaluation.

“He’s still being held,” Blum said Monday. “I believe that it was a gross misunderstanding and other than that I don’t have any other comment.”

Miyakawa, who was born in Tokyo and is about 50 years old, has worked for a New York-based architect Rafael Vinoly for the last 20 years and also has an independent design practice.

Vinoly’s firm released a statement Monday praising Miyakawa for his “extraordinary brand of professionalism” and said he has been a mentor to generations of young architects.

“Takeshi is a fabulous human being and a person of extraordinary talent,” Vinoly said. “We hope this misunderstanding is cleared up as quickly as possible.”

New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement that the charges sounded “like a wild overreaction.”

“It’s hard to understand why a light-up bag in a tree would be treated as an attempted terrorist act unless there’s more to the story than has been reported in the press thus far,” she said.

In 2007, an artist touched off a terror scare in Boston by placing electronic devices around the city as part of a marketing stunt for Cartoon Network. The city closed bridges, roads and public transit before authorities realized the signs were not bombs.

On an average day, the NYPD receives nearly 100 reports of a suspicious package. Last year, there were more than 4,000 such reports. The number generally rises following any word of terror threats in New York and around the world.

The concourse checkpoint needs to be there.  Just the same, chances are good that once an adversary has made it to the airport, he or she has engineered a way to outwit the system.  And spend as we might, there will always be a way to outwit the system.  ”Even if our technology is good enough to spot it,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff, commenting on the news of the latest underwear plot, “technology is still in human hands and we are inherently fallible.”

That’s one of the smartest things I’ve heard a politician utter in some time.

Getting a handle on this takes us all the way back to Sept. 11, 2001, the day that everything, and yet really nothing, changed.  I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Conventional wisdom holds that the 19 hijackers exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling box cutters onto four Boeing jetliners. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mind-set — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold. (In prior years, a hijacking meant a diversion, perhaps to Havana or Beirut, with hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were accordingly trained in the concept of “passive resistance.”) The presence of box cutters on 9/11 was merely incidental. The men could have used almost anything — a deadly sharp can be fashioned from a broken first-class dinner plate or a ballpoint pen — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The success of their plan relied not on hardware but on the element of surprise. It wasn’t a failure of airport security that allowed those men to hatch their takeover scheme. It was a failure of national security — a breakdown of communication and oversight at the FBI and CIA level.

To put it succinctly: The success of the 9/11 attacks had almost nothing to do with airport security at all — a great and painful irony, of course, to any passenger forced to endure the checkpoint rigmarole in 2012.

Not that frontline guards don’t play a deterrent role.  And, in the opinions of some, the plot uncovered in Yemen underscores the value of full-body scanners — those controversial walk-through machines that allow guards to look beneath a passenger’s clothing. It’s a compelling argument, but the way in which these scanners have — and have not — been deployed is apt to make some of us cynical. For instance, the vast majority of body scanners are found at U.S. domestic airports. Overseas, where a bomb is far likelier to originate, they are rare. Is this really about safety, we wonder, or is it about billions of dollars going into the coffers of the companies contracted to build these machines?

And although the scanners are effective, where does the arms race end?  Not long ago, the idea that passengers would be marched through body scanners and photographed naked before being allowed to board an airplane, would have seemed outrageous. Yet here we are. What might be next?  The stubborn truth is, we can turn airports into fortresses if we want (in some respects we’re well along that path), yet we’ll never be entirely safe. Airport screening alone, no matter how thorough, how expensive, and how technologically advanced, will never defeat a relentless enough, resourceful enough adversary intent on downing a plane.

That isn’t capitulation, it’s reality.  And acknowledging this reality would go a long way toward warding off panic and overreaction when the next successful attack occurs.

Regrettably, too, we often forget that commercial air travel has long been a target of terrorist extremists.  The 1970s and 1980s in particular were, as I like to describe them, a Golden Age of Air Crimes, comparatively rife with bombings, hijackings and other deadly assaults against airplanes and airports. Over one five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks, including the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772; the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people; and the incredible saga of TWA Flight 847.  And let’s not forget what might have been, such as the so-called “Project Bojinka,” the 1994 scheme masterminded by Ramzi Yousef (nephew of Kalid Sheikh Mohammad), in which impossible-to-detect (at the time) liquid explosives were to be used to simultaneously destroy a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately the plot unraveled and Yousef was arrested.

While we can argue, quite persuasively, that many of the current-day security measures have done little if anything to make us safer, we’ve nevertheless introduced measures that have been useful and effective, from explosives screening of checked luggage to the sorts of trans-border partnerships that broke up the most recent plot from Yemen. Whether in spite of, or because of, the attention we’ve lavished on All Things Terrorism, the past decade has seen fewer attacks against commercial air travel than any since the 1950s.What we need to remember, though, is that our success has had more to do with the security measures we don’t see than those taking place in plain view. And if our luck is to hold, we need to better rationalize and streamline our entire approach to airport security. For instance, if we’re going to have those body scanners, let’s put them where they’re needed. If this requires negotiating with foreign authorities whose airports are beyond TSA’s jurisdiction, so be it. Meanwhile, here at home, TSA’s one-size-fits-all approach, in which every single person who flies is seen as a potential threat, is simply unsustainable in a country where close to 2 million people fly daily. Things like taking snow globes from children, haggling over tiny container sizes, or confiscating a dessert fork from a uniformed, on-duty airline pilot (it happened to me) serve no useful purpose whatsoever. On the contrary, they divert valuable time and resources away from the things that could make us safer.  Let’s scale back that concourse Kabuki and retrain guards in the finer points of a more sensible, risk-based assessment of passengers and their belongings.

And lastly, if only as an aside, let’s behold for a moment the term “underwear bomb.”  That was the operative phrase in literally hundreds of articles and broadcasts over the past several days, and nowhere did it raise a snicker.  What does it say about our country, I wonder, that such a preposterous expression is instantly understood and effectively taken for granted?

Strange times indeed.

This should be our Nuremburg, the defining trial of the 9/11 era and a fitting coda to it.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to be on the verge of squandering this opportunity, and with it, the best, and perhaps only, chance for the public to understand not only how the attacks came to be, but why Mohammed waged a relentless war against America and how we might stop the next would-be terrorist mastermind.

The problems lie within the reformed military-tribunal system that the Obama administration put in place after losing its fight for a civilian trial in New York. Political compromises have resulted in a flawed military commissions process that from outward appearances is not only rigged against the defense, but hyper-choreographed, censored and hermetically sealed.

“The process is designed to achieve a conviction, and to do it with as little revelation as humanly possible, but with the veneer of due process and justice,’’ said one participant who said restrictive gag orders prohibited him from talking publicly. “You’re talking about the most heinous crime ever, and we’re going to afford them less due process, less discovery, less of everything than we would the guy who shoplifted a pack of gum from CVS.’’

Obama administration officials say their reformed military commissions system is a vast improvement over the Bush administration’s version, which Obama moved to shut down on his first day in office in 2009.

Defense lawyers disagree, and insist they have been hamstrung in their efforts to mount the kind of aggressive defense needed to do their jobs including full and unfettered access to evidence, witnesses and even the accused themselves.

Four of the five legal teams had so few of their key players in place in recent months that they did not file the “mitigation submissions’’ that the government said it needed to decide which of the five men should face the death penalty and other key issues, such as whether to try them together or individually. They recently filed motions asking that the charges be thrown out because of fatal flaws in the system, which they say make it impossible for them to defend their clients.

“It’s window dressing,’’ Mohammed’s defense lawyer, David Nevin, said of the government’s improvements. “I am not all satisfied that it is a fair process. In fact, it is not a fair process.’’

Many of the defense lawyers have quit out of frustration or for other personal reasons stemming from the many delays in the process. Only a few have been there long enough to even begin to understand their clients’ case, not to mention the convoluted military commission process.

And they say they will be unable to effectively challenge confessions obtained when their clients were coercively interrogated in the CIA’s black site prisons, if they can broach the subject at all. This is important for the four men accused of helping Mohammed with the logistics of the plot. Several claim they have been wrongly accused, tortured into confessing, or both.

It is also important with regard to Mohammed, who confessed to dozens of plots while being waterboarded 183 times, and has said he may plead guilty even before the trial begins. Few U.S. counterterrorism officials believe all of his often boastful confessions, and it is important for the public to hear what, exactly, evidence the government has with regard to what he did and didn’t do, and whom he might have been protecting.

The team of Defense and Justice Department officials overseeing the military commission process, and the presiding judge, should quickly address the defense lawyers’ complaints, or a proceeding that some call “The Trial of the Century’’ will be delayed further by legal wrangling — and forever tainted by accusations of being unfair.

A full, fair and transparent trial, above all, will benefit the public. There is much the public doesn’t know about Mohammed, including the details of how he devised the plot, convinced bin Laden to let him do it and then orchestrated it “from A to Z,’’ to use his own words. It was Mohammed who masterminded dozens of other plots and attacks, some while staying a step ahead of the largest-ever criminal manhunt.

Mohammed, not bin Laden, was the one who traveled the world as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed’’ of terrorism, establishing alliances and creating a network of cells and lieutenants that in some cases remains today. And it was Mohammed who personally recruited young jihadist prospects much like a baseball scout, many of them Westerners, tapping into their grievances to turn them to his cause.

The U.S. government has kept the details of what Mohammed did — and how and why he did it — hidden in its most classified files since his capture in Pakistan nine years ago. The government should set the record straight on that, because there is an important lesson to be learned from the largely untold tale of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: It isn’t some monolithic group like al-Qaida that poses a continuing threat, it’s the one intelligent and energetic person who can emerge from nowhere and orchestrate a 9/11 while the world focuses elsewhere.

To that end, the government should declassify as much evidence as possible, and explain how it obtained it. It should call numerous witnesses to testify, especially since the one who has been publicly identified, Majid Khan, claims he was tortured while in CIA custody overseas.

Instead of limiting access to a few closed-circuit TVs, it should consider televising the proceedings. It should ensure that censorship is minimized, and used only to protect intelligence sources and methods, not to save the government from embarrassment. And it should let Mohammed and the others testify at length on their behalf if they so desire.

By doing so, the Obama administration will be able to say it did its best to put on the kind of civilian trial it has wanted all along, and one with a similar outcome to that of the al Qaida members charged with blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

Those of us who witnessed that trial in Manhattan in 2001 saw the defendants squirm in their chairs as prosecutors introduced mountains of evidence against them. We saw eyewitnesses point the finger at the accused, and surviving victims glare at them from the pews.

We heard from the terrorists themselves, and learned a lot about why they did it, about how terrorist networks operate and about what might be done to stop people like them. And when the jury convicted them, there was no question that justice was done.

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)

The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.

In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.

(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)