Bending the Third Rail
Because We Should, We Can, We Do
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Grand Conspiracy
I've been really busy lately, not particularly having the time to study the usual blogs. The news I've received has been primarily headline type stories. The Toronto arrest of suspected terrorists sounded like Canadian officials had busted up a big al Qaeda ring. As usual, it turning out that the story is less than the sensational one being played up:
One report on Monday said that the ammonium nitrate had only been ordered but never delivered, as the security agencies had substituted it with some harmless material. The fact that the swoop spread over two years [and] was a sting operation is being underplayed or not even mentioned by the Canadian and American press and electronic media. There is no evidence that the 17 people arrested, five of them minors, had any link with Al Qaeda. Pen portraits appearing in the Canadian press show some of the young men to have become overly religious in the last couple of years. It is also now known that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and probably some other US agencies were also involved in the sting operation.
So this is a two year sting of mostly very young religious zealots with no apparent contact to al Qaeda? I'm not saying this isn't a story or even an important find for law enforcement. But listening to the media, I had the impression that officials had busted a cell group not unlike the 911 hijackers. These folks sound more like radicalized (thank you George Bush) young people engaging in the new chic' activity, becoming a terrorist. It also sounds like they were not too swift at it, allowing law enforcement folks into their midst over a two year period.

Let me repeat. It's a good thing that these people were found and stopped. But it would be nice if the media would report the whole story, putting the whole thing in a genuine context. This was apparently not an al Qaeda-big-bad-boogieman conspiracy, which is a whole different kettle of fish.
Written at 8:22 AM by Greyhair.
1 comments
1 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
They changed their story that it wasn't a sting operation. The brave officers just swapped the fertilizer with something else.
11:04 PM  
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