The Obama adminstration could do a real service to American justice and make a very public (and, yes, cheap) show of dumping the last vestiges of Bush-Era logical fallacies by exonerating, pardoning or otherwise vacating the judgments handed down yesterday against the shoeless-joe / skid row "terror cell" finally, damnably, convicted of trying to blow up the Sears Tower.

It took three trials, three juries and nearly three years, but federal prosecutors finally succeeded Tuesday in convicting five Miami men of plotting to start an anti-government insurrection by destroying Chicago's Sears Tower and bombing FBI offices. One man was acquitted.

When the FBI swarmed the downtrodden Liberty City neighborhood to make the arrests in June 2006, the administration of President George W. Bush hailed the case as a prime example of the Justice Department's post-Sept. 11 policy of disrupting potential terror plots in the earliest possible stages.

Yet hours of FBI recordings of terrorist talk contrasted with little concrete evidence of an evolving plot, triggering two mistrials because juries could not agree on verdicts against ringleader Narseal Batiste or five followers. One of the original seven defendants was acquitted after the first trial.

If you can't remember this case, don't worry, you're not alone. This was just one of a series of tawdry, trumped-up "terror plots" fabricated by government agents-provocateur and staged post-9/11 to convince us:

• The feds are on the prowl (at least more than they were Sept. 10, 2001), eyes peeled for dangerous schemes.
• We should always be afraid. We should always be very afraid.

At Antiwar.com, Jason Ditz's post best sums up the reality of the "case":

Batiste was well-known in his Miami neighborhood for walking around wearing a bathrobe and wielding a crooked stick which he claimed was a staff. He and his followers met in what was described as a "shabby warehouse," where they studied the bible and practiced martial arts. At the time of their capture, Vice President Dick Cheney termed them "a very real threat." Then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said they represented a "new brand of terrorism" created by "the convergence of globalization and technology."

One of the key elements that stuck with me in the entire kangaroo-court hullabaloo was the detail that these "plotters" specified combat boots on their laundry list of Sears Tower bang-bang gear. Some of these dangerous enemy combatants, evidently, lacked footwear. Seems even al Qaeda can't put boots on the ground... without boots.

On its face, all this seem foolish and farcical, although we can be damn sure it isn't for the five men sweating through this long, Kafkaesque ordeal. After all: As potential "terror threats", how have they been treated? We now know the depths of our own brutality, how monstrously our once-cherished codes of conduct can be perverted and degraded from the top. As American citizens, have they avoided the dungeon/torture tactics doled out by our hamfisted, sadistic inquisitors? If so, perhaps someone should let Jose Padilla in on the gag.

An even darker edge to all this is linked within a comment on the site's blog section; a Christian Science Monitor story details FBI attempts to plant an ex-con informant in a California Muslim community, an operation which publicly backfired in February. In the past, the FBI has used undercover "informants" who act as agents-provocateur to bust up groups as disparate as the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers. These plants sucker groups and individuals into committing criminal acts, then courtroom prosecutions can effectively sabotage and jug up dangerous (or merely controversial) elements. But placing the entrapment foils within communities - indeed, in places of worship - adds a new, and disquieting, component. This case is one of several which have crimped relations between American Muslims and the government's investigative establishment:

The informant posed as a new convert to Islam and reportedly espoused terrorist ideology to several members of the Islamic Center of Irvine. That prompted two members of the mosque, including a man named Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, to report the informant's inflammatory statements to the FBI and ask for a restraining order against him.

FBI officials then began investigating Mr. Niazi and asked him to become an informant, according to the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections, which has formally filed a complaint with the FBI. When Niazi refused, an agent told him he'd make his life "a living hell." Niazi has since been arrested and charged with making false statements to gain his citizenship and failing to disclose that his sister is married to an Al Qaeda operative, according to court documents.

Key question about the terrorist brother-in-law: Barefoot? Or Gellin'?