Miami vice

I hadn't been paying much attention to the Miami arrests of seven young men accused of planning a 9/11-type incident, until seeing this post at veiled4allah.  The arrested were not Sunni Muslims.  Nevertheless, a federal agent-provocateur was able, after six months of trying, to get them to swear alllegiance to al-Qaeda.  He also got them to fantasize about committing a terrorist attack on US hotspots.  But they're Moors, from the Moorish Science Temple of America [wikipedia].  The MSTA was the forerunner of the Nation of Islam (and also of the extremely dyfunctional Nuwaubian cult of Dwight York [wiki]).  It's a synthetic, syncretic, eclectic religion, whose followers, without the FBI's interference, would be unlikely candidates to join al-Qaeda's jihad.   So, when they, or one of them, were quoted by Alberto Gonzales as wanting to "kill all the devils we can", that's the language of Black Muslims when referring to whites, not of an Islamic jihadist talking about infidels.  And the FBI and DOJ would have known that.

So why all the publicity about them?  I can think of two possibilities:  the US government wanted to make a big deal about 'homegrown terrorists', to justify its continuing post-9/11 power grab, so decided to grow seven of its own;  or the story was released in order to distract attention from some other bit of news it didn't want the media to cover.  If it was the latter, I wonder what it was.  (The Suskind book?) (The snooping on bank transactions?) (Both?)