This, apparently, is the face of terror.

66-year-old Sarah Weiss is “responsible”, in part, for the recent terror scare in which we were told that terrorists were trying dry runs of terrorist attacks. A search of her bag yielded 2 old icepacks (The TSA identified them as ‘clay’), which she used for her bad back and a report from a survey of Muslim Americans, which she was reading for her outreach work for her faith-based group. This was July 5, 2007. Weiss was detained and questioned for three hours and was asked, among other things, if she knew Osama bin Laden. You can see the video here.

But, this is not a story about who the local TSA detained. They are tasked with looking into suspicious luggage, even if we don’t necessarily agree with what’s to be considered “suspicious” and they should not make assumptions about who could be involved in acts of terrorism.

No, there is another story here. Weeks later, as the Bush Administration is catching heat over the Attorney General, this report is leaked and a terror warning is issued. We were told about an incident involving clay (the incident above) and another one involving blocks of cheese, supposedly with wires and a cellphone near them. What we were not told was that these incidents, and two others, were explained away and no charges were filed in any of them. In other words, we get another bogus terror alert. In the end, this blew some of the heat off the AG story as we have yet another phony terror alert surfacing at a convenient time form Bush and Co.

Keith Olbermann has a series called The Nexus of Politics and Terror. The latest installment breaks it down quite nicely.

Popularity: 36% [?]