Specious terrorism busts in which a close reading of news accounts reveals that the supposed plot actually originated with police or FBI infiltrators continue to be alarmingly common, despite the change of administration in Washington. The headlines continue to imply that there was a real threat in these cases, while the actual text indicates otherwise. Here's the latest example, with the phrases that let slip the bogus nature of the pseudo-plot in bold. From AP, Oct. 26:

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a suspected player in the country's booming opium trade, has received regular payments from the CIA for much of the past eight years, according to a front-page New York Times account Oct. 28. The report claims the agency pays Karzai for "a variety of services," including helping to recruit a CIA-directed paramilitary group called the Kandahar Strike Force.

Although still blind to the related human rights violations, the scientific community finally acknowledges that "biofuels" fuel deforestation—and thereby result in a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Here's the abstract of the story that appears in the Oct. 22 edition of Science, "Fixing a Critical Climate Accounting Error":

Santiago Alvarez, underwriter of accused right-wing Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles and himself convicted in weapons stockpiling for a supposed terror plot, was released from US immigration custody in Georgia Oct. 22. Alvarez pleaded guilty in 2006 to weapons charges related to what the government called a scheme to overthrow Fidel Castro. His sentence was reduced from four years to 11 months for voluntarily handing over a hidden arms cache. Alvarez, a Miami developer, then got more time for refusing to testify against Posada in an immigration fraud case. Prosecutors said Alvarez was on a boat that secretly ferried Posada from Mexico to Miami in 2005. A US resident, Alvarez was eligible for deportation, but the US doesn't generally deport Cubans; he therefore remained in immigration custody after his release from prison in November 2008. The 2006 bust yielded 30 automatic rifles, a rocket launcher, several grenades, over 200 pounds of dynamite, and 14 pounds of C-4 explosives. (Havana Times, Oct. 23; AP, UPI, Oct. 22)

In case after case since 9-11, the feds have have created specious terror scares by recruiting marginal wing-nuts for fictitious conspiracies through the use infiltrators (read: provocateurs) posing as al-Qaeda operatives—and the media have utterly failed to challenge this unscrupulous entrapment. Now exactly the same tactic has been used against a veteran technician at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the Energy Department's Livermore Labs who is accused of "espionage"—even though the guy who lured him to pass on information was himself a federal agent! And the foreign government in this pseudo-plot wasn't Iran or North Korea, but our supposed ally Israel. From Bloomberg, Oct. 19:

Israel is planning military attacks on Iran after December, the French magazine Le Canard Enchainé asserted Oct. 13. According to the report, quoted by Israel Radio, Jerusalem has already ordered from a French food manufacturer combat rations for soldiers serving in elite units, and asked reservists of these units staying abroad to return to Israel. The report also states that in a recent visit to France, IDF Chief of General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi told his French counterpart Jean-Louis Georgelin that Israel is not planning to bomb Iran, but may send elite units to conduct ground operations there. The magazine suggests these may involve sabotage of nuclear facilities and assassinations of Iran's top nuclear scientists. (ANI, Oct. 15)

The Oct. 2 passing of Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, has occasioned respectful but generally sanitized eulogies in the world Jewish press—with few exceptions, neatly avoiding any mention of his anti-Zionist politics. An Oct. 6 remembrance in New York's Jewish Week is typical in dodging the issue entirely.

In an Oct. 15 New York Times story, "Crossroads of Islam, Past and Present," Robert F. Worth reports from Tarim in Yemen's Hadramawt region, where a thriving Sufi school is attempting to reclaim the area's reputation from the media moniker of "the ancestral homeland" of Osama bin Laden. Is this a long-overdue corrective to demonized portrayals of Islam—or more propaganda in an imperial divide-and-conquer ploy to groom Sufis as domesticated "good Muslims"?