5am. Haven’t been able to sleep. So I got up about 2am intending to work and have instead done what I always do at this hour – watch YouTube videos on 80s film clips. Sad. Very sad.

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When the JFK Airport bomb plot thing broke in the headlines a few weeks ago, I immediately smelled a rat. So I set up a Google news alert on the name of the main guy, Russell Defreitas, so I could track the developments once the main thrust and hype of the original story had died down.

And in the last week, there has already been a lot of interesting reports picked up.

Wired News has this story about how sensationalist the US media has been over the report.

The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press.

What that story doesn’t explain, as this one does, is that Defrietas once worked for Evergreen International Airlines. Who are Evergreen?

A nine-part series in The Oregonian newspaper in 1988 reported that Evergreen International Airlines has close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and functions as an “ad hoc government air arm that thrives on a combination of covert and commercial work.” Work the company had been contracted for included “black ops” missions in Central America, War on Drugs operations around the world, and delivering arms to the Egyptian military, while non-military contracts included tracking ice floes in the Arctic, providing security for John Paul II, and spraying anti-locust pesticides in the Niger.

(source)

So the main guy accused of plotting to blow up JFK airport used to work for a company that is a front for the CIA. Is this starting to sound like a bad film plot yet?

The other thing about this story which interests me is how the “informant” who gave away the JFK plot, Steve (Toro) Francis, is a twice-convicted convicted drug dealer who entrapped the plotters. According to this article, Defreitas and the informant were introduced “last July by another government operative”.

So… the story shapes up like this.

We have an ex-CIA employee who was introduced by the CIA to a twice-convicted crack dealer who then claims there was a plot to blow up JFK airport. No bombs were ever made, no plans even drawn up.

Kurt Nimmo writing in The Daily Scare has this quote:

As Paul Joseph Watson notes, the JFK case reveals “that the terror threat has been overhyped and magnified a thousand-fold for political propaganda,” a fact demonstrated “by documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that show only 0.0015 percent of the total number of cases filed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were terrorism related, despite the fact that the Bush administration has repeatedly asserted that it is the primary focus of the DHS.”

Bruce Schneier. who wrote the Wired News article, hit the nail squarely on the head in an earlier article:

“There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands. The second is to keep people living in fear through constant threat warnings, security checks, rhetoric, and stories of terrorist plots foiled by the diligent work of the increasingly intrusive Department of Homeland Security.”

Now – while the mainstream media in the US and Australia blared the details of the JFK plot across front pages and TV news coverage, how much, if any, coverage will they give to these newly-emerging details? Will they get the same treatment? Or will they be either printed down the back of the paper near the obits or ignored altogether?

Don’t buy into the sensationalist press coverage. Read between the lines. Research. Use the web to get the facts.