News that a federal grand jury has indicted three Toledo-area men for terrorist activities has stoked alarmist headlines warning of Al-Qaeda cells waiting to strike inside America.

It is no surprise that the indictment names an informant called "The Trainer," who has U.S. military background in security, and bodyguard training.

In every major case the so-called terrorist group has a handler that is tied to the US government and its intelligence arms.

Texas Monthly magazine gave the FBI the 1998 Bum Steer Award for forming its own Ku Klux Klan group in order to blow up a chemical plant in Arlington, Texas. The FBI had searched high and low for a real Klan group to entrap but when it couldn't find one in East Texas it decided to create its own and attempt to provocateur the group into committing violent actions.

The process is simple - find a group of semi-retarded white trash or in the Toledo case Muslims, get them to talk about blowing things up or threaten George W. Bush, get them to self-implicate and entrap them.

Then sit back and laugh as the media obsesses about 'Al-Qaeda' in America and just watch the power and funding roll in.

Or worse yet, allow them to carry out the terror attack, such as the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center (pictured above), where it was admitted in the New York Times that FBI agents prevented their informant, Emad Salem, from substituting dummy explosives for real ones and the attack went ahead.

Two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, shared a cozy relationship with the FBI having lived with one of their informants for the latter part of 2000.

In 2003 US newspapers and television news salivated over the story of Iyman Faris, a Pakistani lorry driver and so-called Al-Qaeda member who had plotted to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting its giant reinforced support wires with a blowtorch.

A week later the truth emerged when it was revealed that Faris was an FBI spy who had been on their payroll for months. Compared to the foaming bellicose delivery of the original story, the clarification was reported with barely a whimper by the media.

A brief look at the history of these kind of arrests reminds us to be more cautious about accepting fearmongering at face value.

In Great Britain, an alleged Al-Qaeda cell was arrested on suspicion of preparing to poison the London Underground with Ricin. The government used the incident as a scare tactic to rally Britons behind the imminent war on Iraq. It was eventually disclosed that no Ricin was ever found and all the members of the supposed plot were released with no evidence or charges against them.

In April 2004 police in Manchester arrested a group of Kurds and subsequent newspaper headlines claimed that they were an Al-Qaeda cell planning to bomb Old Trafford football stadium (pictured above). Their evidence for such a claim was based on police interviews with one of the individuals who had attended a Manchester United game two years previously. Simply because he had attended a football game because he supported the team, the tabloid newspapers invented the story that he was planning on bombing the stadium. All of the suspects, who ironically had come to Britain to escape the regime of Saddam Hussein, were released without charge and with no evidence against them.

The London Guardian reports,

"Of the 701 people arrested under the Terrorism Act since the September 11 attacks, half have been released without charge and only 17 convicted under the act. Only three of those cases relate to allegations of Islamist extremism."

Despite this fact we are regularly bombarded with screaming headlines about mass terror sweeps, and it goes unmentioned that in nearly every case every so-called 'terrorist' is released with no evidence against them. The arrests are at the top of the evening news for days but there is no clarification or retraction when the suspects are set free. This leaves the viewer with the impression that terrorists are everywhere and that only a draconian police state can protect them against the threat.