Bulletin: The Sears Tower Is Still Standing

Any alleged terror plot has to be taken seriously, but the Justice Department is amassing a pretty lousy record when it comes to separating the amateurs from the pros.

So it is no surprise that the second trial of the Liberty City Six, formerly the Liberty City Seven, whom the government alleged were planning to take a bus from Miami to Chicago and blow up the Sears Tower ended yesterday with another mistrial.

The Justice Department made a collective fool of itself because Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (remember him?) pulled out all of the public-relations stops and equated these nimrods from the dirt poor Liberty City neighborhood of Miami with the foulest of the Al Qaeda foul.

Gonzo had asserted that the group represented a "new brand of terrorism" created by "the convergence of globalization and technology," but these lads were clearly buffoons who didn't even have the money to buy bus tickets to get to Chicago.

No matter, the government retried the six mistrial defendants (a seventh was acquitted) in the hopes that if it threw everything up against the wall something would stick. Alas, nothing did and the jury was excused after13 days of deliberations.

Next up is the Fort Dix Six, a bunch of hard-drinking blue-collar bozos who asked cops for maps of military installations, had trouble finding lethal weapons, practiced jihadist attacks by playing paintball in the Pocono Mountains, went to a Kinko's to have a videotape of their training sessions made into a DVD, and were infiltrated by not one but two informants, include a brainiac who knew the wide open New Jersey Army base "like the back of his hand" because he once delivered pizzas there for his family's restaurant.

A modest prediction: The informants will bomb on the stand and the Fort Dix Six will walk.