In the fall of 2009, five American citizens were arrested in Lackawanna, New York on terrorism charges. The only weapon found in these men’s possession was a rifle in one of their homes. No plot for attacks of any sort by the men was uncovered, either before the arrests or afterward. Eventually, they were convicted for the general charge of “providing material support” to a terrorist organization because they had visited an al Qaeda training camp once before the attacks of September 11, 2001 took place.

In the wake of their arrest, the case of these American citizens was brought up by two members of the U.S. Senate in speeches to the floor as a justification for major changes to U.S. policy. Senator Joseph Lieberman cited the Lackawanna arrests to urge the quick passage of a bill to establish the Department of Homeland Security:

… the longer we wait to adopt a homeland security measure, the longer it will take to set it up, the more the American people will be exposed to danger from the terrorists who are clearly out there. We see it every day in the paper. We know it ourselves from briefings we have had, both open and classified. The
enemy is there and not just at our door, but as we see from the arrests that occurred in Lackawanna, NY,
within the last week, they are inside the house.

Senator Jon Kyl used the arrest of these five Americans in Lackawanna to argue that there was no time to wait for proof that Saddam Hussein was actually up to anything; the United States needed to go to war as soon as possible, despite a lack of evidence, before the terrorists killed us all:

So the wrong question to be asking at this time is: Can you prove that there is an imminent threat to the United States as a result of which we have to take military action against Iraq? That is the wrong question.

There are many fronts in this war on terror, from Lackawanna in New York where we get the six people who we think were connected to terrorism, to Tora Bora, Afghanistan, where we had to rout out members of al-Qaida…. They are obviously serious people with evil intentions. I think everybody concedes that.

Then the question becomes: Why should you put the burden on the President to prove that at a particular time Saddam Hussein is going to strike the United States in order to conclude that we have to do something about him?

Later, we found out that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, that there was no connection between al Qaeda terrorists and Iraq, and furthermore that the arrested Americans in Lackawanna had no plan to commit a terrorist attack. Yet two prominent Senators made prompt and public use of the Lackawanna arrests to push America into making drastic policy decisions.

This past week, the FBI arrested nine members of the Hutaree sect in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. A grand jury indictment accuses the Christian fundamentalists of working to obtain weapons of mass destruction, of planning to murder police officers with specific targets and dates picked out for action in the near-term future. The Hutaree are even captured on video with stockpiles of weapons to be used in attacks.

No speeches before Congress cite the Hutaree.

Besides being more armed and dangerous and having an actual plot to carry out an attack, the Hutaree are different from the Americans arrested in Lackawanna in one other way:

The Hutaree are Christian. The Americans in Lackawanna were Muslim.

No speeches before Congress cite the Hutaree.