Search and seizure

Terror Suspects Not Guilty, Wife Says

In the second such incident in three days, three young men of Arab descent have been arrested in Michigan on terrorist charges. They were stopped after purchasing 80 pre-paid cell-phones from a Wal-Mart, and found to have 1,000 of them in their minivan. The men were charged with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes.

In both cases the defendants claimed they had purchased the phones at various stores in order to resell them elsewhere for a profit.

"All we did is buy the phones to sell and make money," Louai Abdelhamied Othman told the magistrate. He said authorities had previously stopped the group in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

"We've been checked by the FBI before," he said. "They even gave us their card and everything."

Authorities won't say exactly what the men were planning to do with the phones, or why possession of too many cell-phones is sufficient grounds to make an arrest. But county officials claim that cell-phones can be used as detonators for explosives and that the men arrested Saturday were perhaps planning to blow up a local bridge. Yet the news stories don't report any discovery of explosives, bomb making materials or other terrorist paraphernalia.

OK... so if these guys are terrorists, why are they planning to blow up a bridge nobody heard of? Why does Wal-Mart sell untraceable prepaid phones in large volumes in the first place? How many phones can you legally purchase before being accused of terrorist plotting? How many detonators would you need to blow up a bridge? Why would you keep them in your minivan? Where are all the explosives?

What disturbs me is that people can be arrested and detained in this country nowadays without committing a crime and without there being any shred of evidence that a crime has been committed or planned. All you need to do is be or look Arab and do something the authorities consider suspicious.

Is it just possible that the only common sense reason someone would purchase 1,000 phones is to resell them for a profit, just as the defendants claim? Perhaps these men are terrorists after all. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that so many dire terrorist plots by unconnected terror cells have been foiled on both sides of the Atlantic in the past week. Or perhaps we are simply descending to a new level of madness in this country. After all, there are elections in November.