Skelly and his friend Juss

The U.S. Government keeps claiming “wins” in the “war
against terror,” but who are these alleged terrorists?  In the case of the Cleveland 4, it seems the
FBI used a career criminal to manipulate a groups of indigent kids into a “terrorist
plot” against a bridge.  One of them, Joshua
“Skelly” Stafford, was an impoverished developmentally impaired kid who did not
take place in the planning of the event and it’s not clear he understood why he
was in the car on the way to the bridge on the day in question, other than that
he was promised a free meal and cigarettes. 

A sane government might provide food, shelter, and
psychological assistance for a kid like Skelly, but instead our government
chose to coerce him and his equally indigent friends into being “terror
trophies” – pawns that could be used to at once scare the public into thinking
we have a terrorist threat within and at the same time to offer evidence of
“success” in their fake war on fake terror.

 As Vivien Lesnik Weisman reports in the Huffington Post,
Skelly’s story and the fact that he was sentenced to 10 years in prison is an
indictment of our security state.  As she
puts it, it is symptomatic of the failure of the rule of law.