In case you didn’t hear, the terrorists won last week. On Thursday, a Florida jury failed to convict any of the so-called Miami Seven terror suspects. Back in June of 2006, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said these guys were all set to “wage a … ‘full ground war’” against the homeland. The FBI even had wiretaps of them pledging fealty to Al Qaeda and plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. And yet, jurors couldn’t reach a verdict on six of the defendants and acquitted the seventh. How in the world could our government blow such a slam-dunk of a case?

As it turns out, the group wasn’t exactly the Hezbollah of South Beach that Gonzalez made them out to be. They had no weapons and no training, unless you consider paintball a legitimate military exercise. And they had no connection to international jihadists other than an FBI informant who told them he was an Al Qaeda agent. That same informant cajoled the oath of allegiance to Osama Bin Laden out of them. (Can anyone say “entrapment”?) In fact, the whole case against the would-be syndicate relied on two greedy snitches with questionable pasts. As Bob Norman reported in the Miami New Times, one of them failed a polygraph test and both of them seem to have problems keeping their fists away from women’s faces.

In other words: just like Hurricane Katrina blew the roof off of FEMA, this case exposes a serious case of dry rot in the Justice Department’s counterterrorism apparatus. Heck of a job, ‘Fredo! But the Miami Seven debacle isn’t just about incompetence and overzealous prosecution. It’s a spicy gumbo of dishonesty, cynicism and outright corruption—the same Bush Administration recipe that Americans have been swallowing for seven years now. I’ve compiled a list of ingredients below. Just mix together, flavor to taste and enjoy.

First, use questionable “intelligence.” Remember Curve Ball? The Iraqi confabulist who told German and American intelligence agencies that Saddam Hussein had oodles of WMD? Turns out, he just wanted a green card and was telling authorities what they wanted to hear. The Curve Ball of the Miami Seven case was longtime tattletale Abbas Al-Saidi. In 2004, the FBI sprung Saidi out of a jail for beating up his girlfriend and within a year, he had “discovered” the Seven. All told, he and another informant, Elie Assad, netted over $100,000 of our tax dollars for their work.

Second, politicize the threat of terror. I’m not saying that the Miami Seven were choir boys. But they were hardly Hamas or the Baader-Meinhof Gang, or even the Apple Dumpling Gang. They were about as close to bombing the Sears Tower as George W Bush is to editing an annotated edition of Camus’s The Stranger. Nonetheless, Gonzalez decided in mid 2006 that he couldn’t wait a minute longer to round them up and call a press conference about it. Of course, the timing had nothing to do with the upcoming midterm elections. Or Iraq. Or illegal wiretapping. Or Scooter Libby. Or black site CIA prisons. Or torture. Or [fill in scandal here.]

Third, invoke the Doctrine of Preemption. After the arrests, as Gonzalez did all he could to make these paintball enthusiasts into national scourges, the FBI quietly acknowledged that they hadn’t actually done anything, or even come close to doing anything. The official line was that their evil plans were “more aspirational than operational.” Southern Florida’s US Attorney, R. Alexander Acosta reasoned that the Feds sought to “disrupt” the Seven “before they acquire[d] the capability” to act. Never mind that the only person who could have given them such a capability was an FBI informant!

Fourth, politicize the justice system and US Attorneys. Federal prosecutors are famous for their caution when it comes to selecting which cases to take to trial. They almost never indict someone unless they know they can put them away. So why would Acosta bring a weak case like the one against the Miami Seven to court? It might have something to do with that fact that, in the months after the Seven were arrested, more than half a dozen of his US Attorney colleagues were purged for not following Washington’s orders. I’m sure he just crossed his fingers and hoped that the word “terrorist” combined with the black faces in the dock would be enough for convictions.

Finally, play the media, and the rest of us, for fools. When they heard about the Miami Seven, Karl Rove and ‘Fredo Gonzalez must have thanked their lucky stars. The White House needed some good press, badly. And these schmucks were just the ticket. Poor, black, and part of a weird religious group called the “Seven Seas of David,” they even liked to sport turbans. It didn’t matter that thousands of white dead-enders all over the country act just as strangely, hording assault rifles and raving about the UN’s “black helicopters.” No, what mattered was the production value. The pitch. And the fact that the Seven were the quintessential “others”—straight out of central casting and ready for prime time. The kind of guys Jack Bauer chews up and spits out every week on 24. In other words, the perfect bogeymen for a faltering President and an anxious empire.

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JB Powell is a contributing writer and the author of The Republic: A Novel.