Following up on our previous post on the Great Miami Media Manipulation, here's Kurt Nimmo detailing how this latest "terrorist threat" is yet another example of one of the Bush Regime's most effective propaganda tactics: using and abusing the mentally ill to hype minor cases into major, fear-fomenting mind games – which a dull-witted and sensation-enslaved media dutifully megaphones to high heaven. See FBI Exploits Mentally Ill in “Homegrown” Terrorism Effort and for more context, Zubaydah: an Insane “Travel Agent” for “al-Qaeda.

Excerpts: Likewise, it now appears Abu Zubaydah is delusional, a condition that likely became pronounced after a heaping dose of CIA torture and abuse. “According to sources, (Mr. Zubaydah) was water-hooded, a technique in which a captive’s face is covered with a towel as water is poured atop, creating the sensation of drowning,” Suskind reveals. “He was beaten. He was repeatedly threatened, and made certain of his impending death. His medication was withheld. He was bombarded with deafening, continuing noise and harsh lights…. Under his duress, Mr. Suskind writes, Mr. Zubaydah told his captors that U.S. shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, public water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge and Statue of Liberty were being targeted by al-Qaeda...."

...It is now an established pattern: the government seeks out mental cases and disturbed individuals and turns them into “al-Qaeda” terrorists, or wannabe al-Qaedaites. Narseal Batiste, “the accused ringleader of a wacky terrorist cell” in Miami, as the New York Daily News puts it, “needs psychiatric help,” according to his father, Narcisse Batiste. “He was distraught after his beloved mother, Audrey, died in 2000, relatives told The News, and the next year he left Chicago and dropped out of sight..."

If not for the “confidential government informant” inserted in their midst, who convinced them to pledge allegiance to the cartoonish “al-Qaeda,” there would be no case.

After “sweeps of various locations in Miami, government agents found no explosives or weapons. Investigators also did not document any direct links to al-Qaeda,” [reported Knight-Ridder]. "But this complete lack of evidence did not stop the FBI. “This group was more aspirational than operational,” said John Pistole, the FBI’s deputy director. In other words, merely thinking about “al-Qaeda,” even if such a thought is planted by an agent provocateur, is illegal, a crime against the state.

George Orwell called this “thoughtcrime,” and wrote: “Thoughtcrime is the only crime that matters.” It does not matter if the hapless victims of FBI entrapment in Miami were actually a threat, the point here is they were thinking about “al-Qaeda,” never mind this thought was planted in the mind of Narseal Batiste by the FBI...