Terrorists or wannabes?
America's War on Terror took a personal turn for me Friday with the news that a homegrown terrorist cell had been uncovered in my hometown.
The plot was busted not just in Miami, but in my neighborhood, Liberty City, a few blocks from where I grew up. Seven men allegedly concocted a plan to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, among other targets. Officials say they pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda , though their closest contact to Osama bin Laden was talking to an undercover federal agent. They asked an informant to front money for such essentials as guns and boots, according to the indictment.
The US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales , characterized their arrests as stopping a serious threat to our nation. But neighbors of the men involved, who went by noms de guerre such as ``Brother Naz" and ``Brother Rot," indicated that they thought of them more as neighborhood guys who liked weight lifting and martial arts and dreamed big dreams they were unlikely to carry out, a suspicion some officials partly endorsed.
``You don't want to dismiss it just because they don't have a pot to pee in," one agent told The Miami Herald. ``What happens if guys like this run up against somebody for real who can finance something serious?"
That's a good question, yet it is easy for me to understand the general skepticism. Miami, after all, is a notorious breeding ground for crazies. The would-be terrorists are far more likely to be pursuing their own vision of separatism than to be followers of radical Islam.
The fact is, a bunch of guys begging to be advanced a machine gun probably aren't a serious threat to one of America's most heavily guarded buildings. They would have been hard-pressed to blow up the long-closed Sears department store a couple of miles away from them.
The arrests probably caused less alarm in New England over the weekend than the prospect of a couple of Red Sox rainouts. But we should probably all be worried when something like this gets paraded as proof that the country in making great strides in the battle against domestic terrorism.
Liberty City has, on occasion, been the home of real terrorists. Followers of Yahweh Ben Yahweh terrorized the area throughout the 1980s. The sect built a real estate empire by force, and some members were implicated in 14 murders, resulting in convictions for murder and conspiracy. Its followers believed they were black Israelites being led back to the Promised Land.
Narseal Batiste is the purported leader of the group arrested last week, which had nothing of substance on its résumé. The members just don't appear to have amounted to much.
By law, it may not matter whether this group had the means to pull off the kind of action they were discussing. Civil libertarians are already advancing the notion that there might never have been a plot without the prodding of informants. That will be deliberated in a courtroom someday. But a bigger issue for the rest of us might be whether our antiterrorism efforts are landing real terrorists or just shaggy bands of wannabes.
The unsettling reality is that there are people in this country who feel deeply alienated. Some of those people will do harm given the opportunity, while most of them are dangers mainly to themselves. We're going to have to decide what constitutes a terrorist.
I doubt that the country is much safer than it was a few days ago, because I doubt that this ``cell" was ever much of a threat. I doubt even Liberty City is safer -- which is a shame, because that area needs all the law enforcement it can get. It is a daily target, not of terrorism, but of the tyranny of drugs, violence, and neglect. If only the undercover officers could crack that.
But not to worry, our nation has won a major victory. Brother Naz and Brother Rot are off the street. Gonzales seems to believe Miami can breathe easier, and Boston can, too.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 
