ABC News is reporting that the much-ballyhooed arrest of the arms dealer attempting to sell a surface-to-air missile to FBI agents is considered a "government setup from start to finish" within law enforcement circles, and that the suspect is a small operator who "had no contacts in Russia to buy the missiles before the sting and had no known criminal record for arms dealing."

One can generally assume with the Bushies that the most trumpeted claims of success are fraudulent.

I'm sure that rather than capturing somebody trying to sell missiles to terrorists, the left would prefer a plane be shot down, since another terrorist attack would be damaging to President Bush and his hopes for reelection. Maybe it will work out for you guys the way Michael Moore envisioned - the terrorists will shoot down a plane in a conservative state such as Georgia or Idaho so as to kill as many Republicans as possible. By all means, keep hope alive.

I KNEW someone would take that tack -- 'cept this guy was trying -- for the FIRST time that anyone can ascertain -- to sell missiles to people he THOUGHT were terrorists.

Read more carefully. Or just read.

As for the continued scummy implications that "the left" wants terror to succeed, I don't want to see any planes shot down. Save One.

I suspect the lefties will say alQ is no biggie either

Well of course he thought they were terrorists. This is like saying that busting a guy who hires an undercover agent to kill his wife is wrong because the guy didn't know he was talking to an agent, he THOUGHT he was talking to a hitman.

Now which plane is it you want to see shot down, exactly?

You know...

this is a losing battle. You arrest this guy and it's a joke... you dont and a plane is shot down, no one did their job.

You search people who look like terrorist, you are a racist...

You try to crack down on border crossings, you are anti-hispanic. If a terrorist ever came over that way, you failed to do anything...

Just to many special needs to please everyone and anyone.

The point is, since the authorities couldn't find a major arms dealer to arrest, they found a minor one and spun him as major, for cosmetic media reasons. That's all.

But wait, if on sept 10th.. there would have been a story about guys arrested with box cutters, thinking they were going to hijack planes, you would have also laughed. At that time, it seemed almost impossible that anyone could/would do it...

Minor player or major player, Bill, who cares? Every illegal arms dealer removed from society is a good thing, especially considering how easy it may be to sneak these surface-to-air missiles into a country.

I'm not paranoid about it, but I DO think they're a threat to commercial aircraft. After all, have we not forgotten the attempt to shoot down an Israeli airplane a few months ago with just one of these devices? Thankfully, that attempt was not successful.