But Craig has slipped in a so far widely unnoticed provision that gun industry experts say goes way beyond the one that died in the last Congress. It would bar “administrative proceedings” against the gun industry, which means that along with being immune from most lawsuits, dealers — even unscrupulous ones — would no longer have to worry about having their licenses revoked. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives uses such administrative proceedings to regulate the gun industry. But under Craig’s provision, the ATF’s authority would be greatly curtailed.

When I showed the provision to some industry experts, they were stunned that Congress was poised to make gun dealers and manufacturers virtually free from the authority of both the courts and law enforcement. Robert Ricker, a gun control advocate and former gun industry lobbyist, said the new provision is a dream for the industry. “This is much broader than last year. The [National Rifle Association] has been able to sell this as protecting the Second Amendment. And it goes way beyond that.”

The gun industry and its supporters defend the new bill, saying frivolous lawsuits threaten to bankrupt their companies and deal a blow to the economy as a whole — all for manufacturing a legal product that works as advertised. “To blame [the gun industry] for the criminal misuse of firearms that are lawfully manufactured and sold is unjust,” Rodd Walton, general counsel of gun manufacturer SIGARMS Inc., told a congressional panel this month.

But gun control advocates say they are dumbfounded by the timing of Congress’ effort to indemnify the gun industry because it will come just weeks after the release of a troubling report on guns and terrorism. A Government Accountability Office report released earlier this month said that at least 36 individuals on the federal terrorist “watch list” have walked into gun shops and bought weapons. The report makes the current effort in Congress to provide immunity to the industry painfully ironic to the gun control crowd. “It really ought to be an embarrassment that Congress would push this bill in the wake of a report that terrorists are buying guns over the counter,” said Dennis Henigan, legal action project director at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Observers say the strange juxtaposition speaks to the momentous clout of the National Rifle Association and the gun industry — and may have exposed like never before a glaring blind spot in homeland security. Where the Bush administration’s “war on terror” has conflicted with the interests and raw political power of the gun lobby, mounting evidence shows that the war consistently loses. Henigan noted that suspects on the government’s terror watch list cannot board airplanes or cruise ships, but they can buy assault weapons. “There is no question that this radical pro-gun ideology trumps the war on terror,” he said. “It is quite striking.”

Some gun law experts say the Bush administration has shown a remarkable willingness to push the edge of the civil liberties envelope, citing the necessities of war — the “sneak and peak” provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act and the naming of U.S. citizens as “enemy combatants” being prime examples. But as conservatives have consolidated power since 9/11, they have done little to stop would-be terrorists from arming themselves here in the United States. And as they have pursued an agenda that includes an ostensible dedication to preserving the sanctity of the Second Amendment, their success may have had the unintended consequence of making it easier, not harder, for terrorists to get guns.

“Nothing has been done, and in fact it has gone the other way,” said Ricker. “Look at the whole way the administration has handled things since 9/11. There is a constitutional right to travel, for example, but [the administration is willing to] restrict rights to travel. They have [attacked terrorism] through banking and financial transactions. But as far as guns go — the Second Amendment — it is wide open.”

We rarely first think of terrorists’ connections with guns so much as their use of other weapons, like explosives or hijacked airplanes. Yet, remember the indelible image of the crouching Osama Bin Laden, aiming an AK-47 assault weapon; or gun-stockpiling Timothy McVeigh’s obsession with “The Turner Diaries,” in which a gun enthusiast blows up FBI headquarters to protest tighter gun laws. Should armed terrorists attack a domestic target with assault weapons tomorrow, it would not be as if we weren’t warned. The “How Can I Train Myself for Jihad” manual, reportedly found in safe houses in Kabul, Afghanistan, recommends that terrorists arm themselves with assault weapons. “In other countries, e.g. some states of USA, South Africa, it is perfectly legal for members of the public to own certain types of firearms,” the manual says. “If you live in such a country, obtain an assault rifle legally, preferably AK-47 or variations, learn how to use it properly and go and practice in the areas allowed for such training.” According to the GAO report, that is exactly what is happening.

In the January/February issue of the Atlantic Monthly, former national coordinator for security and counterterrorism Richard Clarke looks back on potential terror attack scenarios. In one, he imagined four terrorists attacking the Mall of America in Minnesota, armed with TEC-9 submachine guns, street-sweeper 12-gauge shotguns and dynamite. They killed 300 and wounded 400. “It had not been hard for the terrorists to buy all their guns, legally, in six different states across the Midwest,” Clarke warns.

And indeed, as the GAO reported, it seems that some potential terrorists are buying guns legally. I wanted to see what they could get their hands on. After a 15-minute written safety quiz at the local National Rifle Association range in Northern Virginia (answers are provided), I put 34 bullets into the head and neck of a human-shaped target from 150 meters away, using an M-16 propped on a table and fitted with a small scope. I missed four times. I had never shot a gun before in my life, but I can go to the local gun shop and buy one. And a frightening array of weapons is now on the market that would put the M-16 to shame. Last November, the Department of Homeland Security sent an “Officer Safety Alert” to agents warning them about the FN Herstal Five-Seven. It’s a handgun that can penetrate body armor, a capability usually reserved for rifles. According to FN Herstal’s Web site touting the gun: “Enemy personnel, even wearing body armor, can be effectively engaged up to 200 meters.”

Tennessee-based Barrett Firearms Manufacturing makes the 82A1 .50 caliber sniper rifle. Accurate from a mile away, the rifle’s huge round can go through an engine block or take down an airplane or helicopter. A May 2003 after-action report from an Army sniper team in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne describes the power of a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. The report said the rifle was used “to engage both vehicular and personnel targets out to 1,400 meters.” It said the snipers liked the rifle, in part, because of the “psychological impact on other combatants that viewed the destruction of the target.” A sniper team using that rifle reported: “My spotter positively identified a target at 1,400 meters carrying [a rocket-propelled grenade] on a water tower. I engaged the target. The top half of the torso fell forward out of the tower and the lower portion remained in the tower.” The report says that in some cases, targets were disintegrated when shot with the rifle. These guns are widely available, and no special license is needed to buy one.

If Craig’s bill passes, the ATF will have little or no ability to take away the license of a dealer who unscrupulously allows Herstal Five-Sevens or .50 caliber sniper rifles to flow into the wrong hands. Joe Vince, the former chief of the ATF’s Crime Gun Analysis Branch, said the bill’s new provision barring “administrative proceedings” would severely hamper his old agency. “When they are talking about administrative, what that means is they cannot lose their license,” Vince said. “So there is no regulatory power.” The ATF reports that 1 percent of gun dealers are responsible for nearly 60 percent of the guns traced to a crime. Vince agreed that most gun dealers play by the rules. “So who are they protecting here?” Vince asked.

The sponsor of the House version of Craig’s immunity bill, Florida Republican Cliff Stearns, said the new language means the ATF can only take away a license if it can prove that a gun dealer “willfully or knowingly” violates the law — the same standard the bill sets up to let some lawsuits proceed. “If that’s the case, the ATF can still revoke a license,” Stearns said in a statement to Salon. A spokesman for Craig said the senator agrees with Stearns.

But Brian J. Siebel, a senior attorney at the Brady Center, disagrees. He said it is a “real admission” that Stearns admits he is curtailing the ATF’s authority at all. He points out that the wording of the legislation does appear to tie the ATF’s hands in all cases. “He is trying to pull the wool over your eyes,” said Siebel.

Stearns and his supporters make a big deal out of the fact that their bill still holds dealers accountable to the ATF or the courts where it is clear a dealer purposely broke the law. But critics say gun dealers know the loopholes. In the case of the D.C. sniper, the bureau found that the dealer had lost 283 guns over three years, sparking allegations that that it was actually illegally selling guns to criminals off the books. The gun dealer’s inventory magically shrank while its guns showed up in the hands of criminals. There were no records proving the dealer knew he was breaking the law. That dealer, Bull’s Eye, was among the top 1 percent of dealers in numbers of guns traced to a crime.

If Craig’s legislation passes, it will be the latest in a long line of actions since Bush took office making powerful guns easier to get and harder to trace, even as politicians on both sides of the aisle claim to be getting tough on terrorism. In a speech to the United Nations soon after 9/11, Bush had called on the world to crack down on terrorists’ financing, improve intelligence, coordinate law enforcement and keep guns out of terrorists’ hands. “In this war on terror, each of us must answer for what we have done or what we have left undone,” Bush told the U.N. General Assembly on Nov. 10, 2001. “We have a responsibility to deny weapons to terrorists and to actively prevent private citizens from providing them.”

Yet, under a law Bush signed in January 2004, the government now destroys in 24 hours all records from background checks of gun purchasers. Critics had said keeping the records would help the government track fraud and abuse. In his hypothetical scenario at the Mall of America, Clarke writes: “This meant that if a gun buyer subsequently turned up on the new Integrated Watch List, or was discovered by law-enforcement officials to be a felon or a suspected terrorist, when government authorities tried to investigate the sale, the record of the purchase would already be on the way to the shredder.” Right after 9/11, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to give the FBI access to records that might have helped determine if any of the 1,200 people detained immediately after the attacks had sought to buy weapons.

In September 2004, Congress allowed the ban on assault weapons to expire. President Bush has said he supports the ban, and has faced harsh criticism for expending little political capital to extend it. Gun rights groups say the ban was mostly aesthetic. But perhaps most important, the ban also outlawed ammunition clips larger than 10 rounds. Now, clips are unregulated, giving potential terrorists more continuous firepower for their high-powered weapons.

While the government’s “war on terror” continues, Congress also has not yet closed the “gun show loophole.” Sales at gun shows are completely unregulated in most states, and most purchases require no background checks. There is concern that the shows are open-air bazaars for criminals, and possibly terrorists. Congress also passed what is known as the “Tiahrt Amendment,” named after Kansas Republican Rep. Todd Tiahrt. It keeps secret from the public ATF data tracing weapons used in crimes.

Congress and the White House have also failed to close the loophole that allows people on federal watch lists to legally buy guns. Congress has previously come up with a raft of reasons to bar a gun purchase, such as the 1968 ban for felons or illegal immigrant status. But more than three years after 9/11, being a suspected terrorist doesn’t disqualify one from buying a gun. FBI Director Robert Mueller told a House panel this month that perhaps that should be changed. “We ought to look at what can be done to perhaps modify the law to limit that person’s access to a weapon,” Mueller said. Justice Department officials said no proposal to do that is forthcoming. Kevin Madden, a department spokesman, said preventing terrorists from buying guns might alert them that they were under surveillance. “The terrorist watch list is an intelligence watch list that is constantly evolving,” Madden told me.

The ATF said it doesn’t hunt terrorists, per se, but that it does go after gun criminals and hopes terrorists get caught in the net. “Our criminal efforts are also our terrorism efforts,” said ATF spokesman Drew Wade. “We have to enforce the laws of the land. So hopefully enforcing the laws of the land will help with terrorism as well.” The ATF said firearms investigations have increased 93 percent over the past five years, and the number of defendants referred for prosecution on firearms violations has increased 135 percent over the same period.

Ricker, the former gun show lobbyist, worries about indications that the new bill giving immunity to the gun industry will pass. He said he bets that few lawmakers even know about the provision that would hog-tie the ATF. “I think it is incredible that the Republicans are kowtowing to a strong political ally,  the NRA. That is now spilling over to things like this immunity bill. They just say, ‘This is [about] guns; I’m voting for it.’ They obviously have not even read the bill.”

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.)